Why is it important to hire a software QA team? FAQ about quality assurance

Quality assurance (QA) is an important stage of the software development process that has a direct impact on project success. With quality assurance, software experts deliver performant, user-friendly websites and applications while preventing potential issues and enabling security. As software mistakes may lead to heavy expenses, QA allows for saving costs and increasing trust in your services.

In this article, our software QA engineers will describe the primary benefits of quality assurance. You will also learn how QA will help you ensure compliance with software requirements, from scalability and high availability to user experience.

What is QA in software development?

QA focuses on monitoring software development processes and techniques to deliver high solution quality and achieve conformance with project requirements. This may involve providing compliance with worldwide accepted standards such as ISO/IEC 9126, SPICE, or CMMI.

Often software QA services are associated with testing, which means writing and conducting tests to identify bugs and errors in the code. However, software system testing is a part of quality assurance. QA in software engineering refers to the continuous improvement of product creation processes to enhance quality control.

In fact, QA focuses on delivering apps and websites that have the following characteristics:

• Usability. The goals of quality assurance include verifying that users can easily interact with a software product and understand how it works.
• Functionality. QA experts check whether the functionality is implemented properly and whether the system meets the necessary regulations. Additionally, a software QA team validates how different components of the platform interact with each other.
• Efficiency. QA specialists see if a software architecture is created with scalability and performance in mind.
• Reliability. To achieve high availability and resilience, software quality assurance engineers analyze how an application performs under specific conditions, such as heavy loads or module failure. Furthermore, a software QA team verifies if sensitive data is stored and processed in a secure way.
• Maintainability and portability. QA aims to provide ease of maintenance to reduce the effort for releasing upgrades and introducing new features with zero downtime. Portability, in its turn, refers to ensuring seamless solution integration or installation.

Now, explore the answers to popular questions about software QA services to learn when you should engage quality assurance engineers, how QA experts help build quality software, and what types of testing exist.

Frequently asked questions about software QA services

1. Do I need to hire QA engineers for my project?

Yes, certainly. QA is a key software development stage that allows for ensuring compliance with quality standards and project requirements, as well as the necessary regulations. Using software QA services, you will prevent potential bottlenecks that comprise performance issues and security vulnerabilities. As software failures may cost thousands and millions of dollars, it is crucial to focus on QA for cost savings and increased trust in your products.

2. Why should you engage QA experts from the project start?

As a rule, QA experts are involved in every stage of the software development life cycle. The task of a software QA team is to verify that each step—customer needs analysis, work planning, design, programming, testing, deployment—is performed right.

In addition, QA professionals make sure that software engineers follow best practices to deliver the highest solution quality. By engaging QA specialists from the project start, you will improve team collaboration, prevent potential issues, and increase product success chances.

3. What are the well-known examples of software failures?

Starbucks

In 2015, Starbucks lost millions in sales because of a major computer system failure that was caused during a daily system refresh. Stores were not able to carry out payment transactions. At some point, many coffee houses were giving drinks free of charge. As a consequence, 60% of cafes in the US and Canada were forced to close until the problem was addressed.

TSB Bank

Another example is a massive online banking outage that took place after the software upgrade in April 2018. This upgrade was planned to suspend digital banking services for one weekend only but resulted in months of disruption.

Millions of TSB clients were locked out of their bank accounts for two weeks. Furthermore, some customers were shown the information from the accounts of other people. When the new system was turned on, users also experienced issues trying to sign in.

4. How does QA allow for saving costs and maintaining reputation?

The use of software QA services allows for preventing data breaches and performance issues that may lead to significant losses. For instance, a server running the UK NATS (National Air Traffic Services) system for flight data processing failed in December 2019.

As a consequence, more than 150 flights from London airports were canceled while hundreds of flights were delayed. This way, poorly performed QA or the lack of it can result in not only huge expenditures but customer dissatisfaction, low retention rates, and harmed company reputation.

5. How will you enforce security by hiring a QA team?

The purpose of software QA services is to ensure data security and protect against various threats that involve hacker attracts, malware, and viruses. Software quality assurance engineers also prevent data breaches that may arise after product release.

It is worth noting that at Arateg, our developers also set up continuous system monitoring to instantly identify potential issues and automatically restart failed components.

6. How does QA help ensure compliance with project requirements?

Before project development, the client or software experts write a technical specification that contains the requirements to solution design, functionality, use cases, performance, and other aspects. Thanks to this document, everyone in the team has a clear understanding of how the future product is expected to look and operate, as well as what pain points it has to address.

During the software testing process, QA engineers verify that an app or website aligns with customer requirements listed in the document.

7. Does QA aim to achieve conformance with the required standards?

Yes. Software quality assurance services aim to ensure conformance with worldwide accepted standards, for example, ISO/IEC 9126, which is used to meet a variety of quality internal and external metrics. In addition, QA experts verify that a software system is compliant with the necessary industrial and security regulations.

For instance, financial technology companies have to comply with PCI DSS, ISO/IEC 27001, and GDPR. US healthcare institutions must achieve compliance with HIPAA and HITECH.

8. What is the difference between QA and software testing?

The main goal of quality assurance is to deliver performant solutions that look and behave as intended, comply with client specifications, as well as meet the necessary standards. QA professionals make sure that a software system is created properly and best development practices are used.

Software system testing is a process of detecting bugs and errors. Testers identify defects and describe them to software engineers for further debugging. Then, the product is prepared for release. In fact, testing is a part of software QA services.

9. Do I need to conduct manual or automated testing?

To find out the answer to this question, let’s have a closer look at these types of application testing. When conducting manual testing, software experts play the role of end users to find bugs and errors. Simply put, they interact with the solution to verify that it performs as intended with no defects. During this process, testers generally follow a test plan written earlier.

Automated testing allows QA specialists to reduce the time for repetitive tasks while increasing test coverage and eliminating human errors. Employing software tools and programs by testers, it is possible to save up to 30% on quality assurance services. Thanks to this, organizations can significantly cut time to market, which is essential under tight deadlines.

When building a small or medium-sized project, it is recommended to use manual testing. However, automated testing can become a magic pill if you need to implement a large-scale project when improved productivity is crucial. Additionally, automated testing can be applied to cases that are difficult to check manually.

10. What types of application testing are used by our team?

Besides manual and automated testing mentioned above, software QA engineers conduct:

• Functional testing. To make sure that each system component and the whole product operate in compliance with a software requirement document.
• Usability testing. QA professionals analyze how users interact with the application to explore where they have issues. The primary objective is to ensure ease of use and.
• Security testing. Serves to protect software solutions against hacker attacks and viruses, as well as provide the privacy of sensitive information.
• Localization testing. When building a software platform that will be used across several or multiple regions, it is important to perform localization testing. QA specialists check conformity with cultural standards of a particular country, which includes linguistic translation, app settings, and other factors.

There are many other types of application testing that we conduct in our company, involving compatibility, configuration, feature, and installation testing.