Software testing and quality assurance is a key part of any software development life cycle process. It helps in preventing defective software from getting released by detecting bugs, functional mismatch, and code execution issues.
It is very important to know the effect of software testing and quality assurance services when you outsource your software development application. There are various standards and steps, which, if followed in early stages of development can help in performing efficient testing. By efficiently testing your application, you can reduce the delivery time and cost by 20-30%.
Some of the steps that can result in effective quality assurance process are discussed below.
Accurate Technical Specifications and Requirements
Software requirement specification is the first stage of the software development life cycle. It is a very critical document and must include all interactions and facilities that need to be provided to the users. A well-documented requirement eases the rest of the development cycle.
Complete Test Cases
It is important to have a good testing plan in the form of a Gantt chart, showing the dates on which the bugs will be addressed. Test cases include the step to test the scenarios as well as the assumptions. It’s better to get the test cases created by a separate team other than the development team taking SRS (software requirement specification) as an input. A good testing strategy will help fix the bug in earlier stage; else it will prove to be expensive.
Test Environment
A QA testing environment must be on a machine other than the local development machines. There should not be any testing on developer machine. Moreover, there should not be any changes in the code on the QA server while the testing is going on, as this might result in inconsistent results.
Milestone Releases
You can divide the testing application into multiple functional modules and its subsets and release them for iterative testing every month. Make multiple releases of the whole coding and test the subsets in each release. This will avoid the need to re-write the whole application as the errors will be detected early.
Software Test Reports
Software QA test reports include the status of each test case, i.e. pass/fail. Before testing the release, you need to ensure that an internal QA has been done with bugs getting detected and fixed.
In addition, some of the other steps include:
- Thorough Testing
- SEO Testing
- Regression Testing
- Bug Management Software to track Bugs
- Performance and Security Testing
You may also like: 5 Preeminent Benefits of Independent QA Services
