That’s a lot of users deleting an app when it doesn’t meet their needs. But, by creating a high-quality, bug-free app, you can greatly lower the chances of this happening. Why is this important? Poorly tested software usually has bugs, performance issues, and even localization errors that might go unnoticed by developers.
The solution? An app that’s been carefully checked for quality will keep customers around, help grow your business, and offer a user experience people will love. To make this happen, you need a well-planned quality assurance strategy that puts quality first and fits smoothly into your DevOps process.
What is QA Strategy?
A plan for quality assurance details the team’s testing methods, tools used, task assignments, and collaboration for meeting quality goals. The main objective of a QA strategy is to ensure that your products work properly, have few problems, and are safe for users upon delivery.
Why is a good QA strategy so important? Here are a few reasons:
- Catch issues early and save money: Fixing bugs early in development is much cheaper than fixing them after the product is launched.
- Boost customer satisfaction: High-quality products with few issues make for better user experiences, which can increase customer loyalty.
- Speed up releases and updates: With solid test automation and a smooth QA process, your team can release updates quickly and confidently.
- Build lasting testing knowledge: Documented processes and shared insights mean that your organization keeps valuable testing knowledge even if team members leave.
Now that you know what a QA strategy is and why it matters, how do you start putting it into action?
Key Components of a QA Strategy
Quality Assurance (QA) includes six main parts:
- Pre-Project Quality Elements
- Contract Review: Understands customer needs, checks project schedules and resources, reviews team and client abilities, and looks at any risks.
- Development and Quality Plans: Makes project and quality plans after a contract is signed or a project is approved.
- Project Life Cycle Quality Elements
- Project Development Plan: Outlines timelines, resources, risk checks, team structure, methods, and plans for software reuse.
- Detecting Quality Deviations: Spots any deviations from quality standards.
- Starting Improvements: Makes enhancements in quality components as needed.
- Reporting Quality Concerns: Share quality concerns with the QA team or unit.
- Error Prevention and Improvement Infrastructure
- Software Quality Management: Manages activities to maintain software quality.
- Standardization, Certification, and QA Assessments: Standardizes processes, meets certification needs, and evaluates QA practices.
- QA Organizational Setup
- Team Organization: Sets up the right people for effective QA.
- Factors Affecting QA Components
- Organization and Client Factors: Client type, product type, company size, collaboration with others.
- Project and Service Factors: Complexity, team experience, software reuse.
- Staff Considerations: Skills, team familiarity, and other relevant aspects.
- QA Organizational Foundation
- Includes management, software testers, QA teams, and experts in software quality.
- Objectives: Create and support QA components, find deviations, recommend improvements, and involve QA stakeholders.
- Quality Management Standards
- Sets standards for requirements, letting the organization decide on implementation.
- Examples: SEI CMM, ISO 9001, ISO 9000-3, IEEE 1012, ISO/IEC 12207.
Steps to Build the Ultimate QA Strategy
Here’s a straightforward guide on building an effective QA strategy, making it easy to understand each step:
Set Clear Quality Goals
Begin by defining quality goals that match your business objectives. Engage with stakeholders such as product managers, developers, and users to collect their views on the product’s performance and user experience. Ensure that these objectives adhere to the SMART criteria. For example, strive for a 95% pass rate on tests or restrict critical bugs to three following a release. Record these goals in order to direct your quality assurance tasks.
Assess the Existing Testing Procedures and Tools
Examine your current QA procedures and tools in detail. Obtain input from your testing team to determine what is effective and what is not. Evaluate the tools being utilized to identify any deficiencies in functionality or usability. Recognize regions with high manual testing usage and investigate chances for automation. This stage assists in identifying your strengths and areas for growth.
Develop a comprehensive testing strategy.
Develop a detailed test plan outlining the testing strategy, including functional, performance, security, and usability testing. Identify the features to be tested and establish testing deadlines. Allocate tasks to each team member to clarify their duties. This plan acts as a guide for your QA efforts.
Start Test Automation
Identify areas where automation can help the most, like repetitive tasks and regression tests. Choose automation tools that fit your project and team skills. Create automated test scripts for these important areas, ensuring they are easy to update as the application changes. Regularly review these automated tests to keep them relevant. Automation saves time and increases accuracy, allowing your QA team to focus on more complex tests.
Adopt CI/CD Practices
Integrate testing into a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipeline to speed up feedback and quickly find defects. In this setup, automated tests run during the build process to ensure new code changes do not introduce new bugs. Set tests to run after each code change so developers get immediate feedback. This keeps quality high throughout development and reduces the risk of defects in production.
Encourage Collaboration
Promote teamwork among QA, development, and operations teams to align on quality goals. Set up communication channels like regular meetings and collaboration tools to keep everyone informed about testing progress. Encourage discussions about quality and testing strategies. This collaborative approach creates a strong team environment and ensures everyone is committed to delivering a quality product.
Offer continuous training opportunities
Provide ongoing training and professional growth opportunities to maintain the expertise of your QA team. Plan workshops, webinars, or training sessions about the most recent testing techniques, tools, and top practices. Motivate team members to obtain applicable certifications and participate in industry events. Training investments enhance the team’s abilities and ensure they stay current on emerging software testing trends.
Use a Risk-Based Testing Approach
Focus on the most critical parts of your application that could affect business goals. Prioritize testing efforts in these high-risk areas, dedicating resources where they matter most. Use techniques like risk assessments to figure out which functionalities need thorough testing. This strategy ensures your team uses its time and resources wisely, improving product quality while managing testing efforts.
Track and assess efficiency
Establish KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your QA strategy. Typical key performance indicators are defect density, test pass rate, and customer-reported defects. Consistently monitor these metrics to comprehend the quality of the product and the efficiency of testing. Utilize this information to identify patterns, areas that need enhancement, and achievements to acknowledge. Keeping track of performance aids in making well-informed decisions and constantly enhancing QA endeavors.
Encourage the development of an environment focused on ongoing enhancement.
Create a culture that promotes continuous enhancement within the QA team. Encourage team members to contribute insights, share what they have learned, and provide suggestions for improving processes in meetings. Frequently evaluate previous projects to identify successes and areas for enhancement. Building a team that prioritizes open communication and continuous learning leads to the creation of higher-quality products in the end.
Approaches Taken in QA Strategy
It is important to reconsider your software quality assurance strategy if it relies solely on automated or manual testing. An effective QA plan should incorporate automated and manual testing rather than only depending on one type.
Here’s how to create a good balance between the two:
- Look for Automation Opportunities: Identify test cases that are simple to automate or where automating is cheaper than doing it manually. Focus on automating these first.
- Recognize the Need for Human Creativity: Understand when you need human testers’ unique creativity. Some tests require judgment or exploration that only a person can provide.
- Include Exploratory Testing: Schedule exploratory testing phases where human testers can explore and test the app freely. This approach helps find bugs that automated tests might overlook.
- Balance Your Approach: Create a strategy that combines automated testing for repetitive tasks with manual testing for cases that need human insight and creativity.
Using Automation in QA Strategy
Here is how you leverage automation in QA strategy:
- Increased Efficiency: Automation tools can quickly run repetitive tests, cutting down the time spent on manual testing. By automating regression tests, your team can concentrate on exploratory and important testing.
- Improved Accuracy: Automated tests help reduce human errors, ensuring tests are run consistently every time. Automated scripts can run at the same time in different environments, improving test coverage and reliability.
- Quicker process for receiving responses: Employing Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) methods allows teams to quickly identify problems early on by providing instant feedback on code modifications. Automation accelerates the testing process, leading to an increased pace throughout the entire development cycle.
- Cost: Although there may be initial costs for tools and training, the benefits of reduced testing time and fewer defects in the long run outweigh the expenses. This enables your team to concentrate their resources on essential areas such as performance testing and user experience.
- Scalability: Automation allows you to increase testing efforts without needing a lot more resources, making it easier to meet growing project demands. Automated tests can easily adapt to changes in application features and environments.
- Enhanced Reporting and Metrics: Automation tools give detailed reports and metrics, providing insights into test results and system performance. These metrics help your team make better decisions about quality and areas that need improvement.
- Integration with Development Tools: Automation can easily work with development and deployment tools, making workflows smoother. This integration encourages better teamwork between QA, development, and operations teams.
You can further leverage automation testing using cloud cloud-based platform.
LambdaTest is a cloud-based platform that uses AI to help you run both manual and automated tests on a large scale. You can test your websites on over 3000 browsers and real devices with different operating systems. It works well with various automation testing frameworks for web and mobile apps, easily integrating with popular tools like Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Puppeteer, Appium, Espresso, and XCUITest.
Additionally, LambdaTest offers a range of free tools to support validation needs, including the JSONPath tester, XPath tester, HTML validators, and more.
Conclusion
Using effective QA strategies is key to delivering high-quality software that meets what users want. By focusing on automation, teamwork, and ongoing improvements, your team can work more efficiently and accurately, which leads to successful projects. By adopting these strategies, you can create a culture of quality that helps your business thrive.
