10 best practices for software quality assurance
Code bugs. Painfully slow applications. Abrupt system crashes. In this day and age, we’ve all experienced these problems from a user perspective. And nothing destroys our high opinion of a software product faster.
No one wants to deal with the hassle of spending an hour on a customer service line trying to recover their lost financial data or figure out why their box was shipped to the wrong address. And no one wants to be on the receiving end of that phone call.
Worse yet, no one wants to live the nightmare of losing all their customers to a competitor after they had a lousy user experience. And startups have failed for this very reason. The people who use your product need to have confidence in it.
If you’re thinking about building a custom software product, quality assurance is not something you can afford to overlook. A low-quality product is a short-lived product. If you’re going to build something, build it right.
What is software quality assurance?
Software quality assurance (QA) encompasses all methods used during the software development process to scrutinize and improve the quality of the product. QA testing should be strategically planned, scheduled, and implemented throughout the project.
As Joe Montvelisky noted in Forbes, “the job of a tester is to provide business value by finding the issues that the team needs to solve before the product is deployed to production.” These issues can include code bugs, security flaws, performance issues, and much more.
What should you test?
Ideally, anything that can be tested should be tested. In a reality of limited resources, be sure to focus on the most pivotal components and features of your product. Here are some key things to consider testing when mapping out your QA strategy.
Performance. Test your product’s speed and response time. Examine what type of load it can handle. Check performance on various browsers and devices.
Reliability. How long can your product run before failure? What causes it to fail? How often do you see errors occur?
Compatibility. Make sure your product is compatible with any platforms, systems, or applications with which it needs to interface.
Security. Know which security standards your product needs to meet and thoroughly test to ensure that it meets them.
Usability. Conduct user testing. Ensure that your product provides a great user experience in a real user environment.
Maintainability. How easy will your code base be to maintain? How long is the code? Is it well written and easy for a new developer to understand?
Best practices for QA
Software quality assurance isn’t just about what to test, it’s also about how to test. Understanding QA best practices will ensure that you’re adequately covering your bases. Let’s take a critical look at what to include in your QA strategy.
1. Agile methodology with continuous integration and delivery
Using an Agile cycle of continuous code integration and delivery (CI/CD) will allow you to easily test often as you iteratively add small increments of new code to your product. Agile development also pairs well with shift left testing, in which testing is started earlier in the development process than what typically occurs with a waterfall approach.
2. Strategically plan and document the QA process
Your QA process should not be haphazard or thrown together at the last minute. Plan out a detailed testing strategy before your developers touch their keyboards. Start with the overall approach, clarifying precise standards, requirements, objectives, and deliverables. Outline each test scope and conditions, and the workflows to be followed.
3. Risk-based testing
A strong QA plan should cover your code base as comprehensively as possible. But it’s simply not feasible to test 100% of your product functionality every time a new line of code is written. You’ll need to prioritize testing what is most essential. Risk-based testing identifies the greatest risks and tests against them.
4. Automated testing
Automating a significant portion of your testing will allow you to test more often with less reliance on human resources. A number of testing automation tools are available to assist. Automated testing is generally most effective when run both at the time of each initial code commit and at regular intervals for a broader code sweep.
5. Regression testing
Sometimes the new code added to fix a bug or enhance a feature breaks another part of the application. Regression testing checks to make sure that recent code changes haven’t regressed some part of the application’s functionality or performance. This type of testing should be scheduled either daily or on some other frequent ongoing basis.
6. Exploratory and ad hoc testing
Employing some manual forms of code testing in conjunction with automated testing will help maximize your QA coverage. Exploratory and ad hoc testing are two techniques that allow testers to go beyond the script and catch tricky issues that slipped through the cracks. Automation is still no match for human intuition.
7. Usability testing
A software application that performs well technically can still be a failure if it’s too cumbersome for the end user. Usability testing simulates the real user environment and examines the interactions between test users and the application. Areas of greatest friction can be identified and addressed to ensure a good user experience.
8. Smoke testing
Continuous testing of your code throughout the development process is essential to catching and correcting problems early. But some issues can still go undetected, and those at the systemic level can prove especially insidious. Smoke testing is conducted at the end of a product build to inspect the product’s functionality and ensure overall stability.
9. Utilize a robust test management system
An effective QA process needs to be supported by best-in-class test management tools. The right QA management system will facilitate both the planning and execution phases of your testing. Key performance indicators, test cases, and results will be seamlessly tracked and reported, and collaboration made easy.
10. Write effective bug reports
When code bugs and other errors are detected, it’s essential to document and process them in an efficient manner. Effective bug reports need to include a clear summary of the issue, specific steps to reproduce it, screenshots when possible, and potential solutions. Having excellent documentation will minimize the time to resolution.
Build a high quality product
Looking to produce a high quality software product? Basecode’s team of software experts can help. Contact us to find out more about how you can partner with us to build a reliable, high-performing product.