QA in Software Development – Implementation & Best Practices

Introduction

When scaling your development operations, the quality of your software must remain uncompromised. This post will dive into the critical QA processes that ensure your products maintain their integrity as your team grows. We'll show you how a robust QA strategy not only prevents costly errors but also accelerates your time-to-market by catching issues before they derail your project.

With years of experience fine-tuning QA processes, we’ve seen how effective QA can transform a project from chaos to success. We’ll share proven strategies that have helped businesses like yours avoid delays and meet their quality standards every time. Spoiler alert: They are not that obvious.

Curious about how to keep your software flawless as you scale? Let’s get started.

Scale your development, not your risks - the importance of QA in software development

‍Quality Assurance (QA) in software development can be boiled down to monitoring the quality of software to make sure that the final product is as reliable, efficient, and error-free as it can be. It’s a critical – complex and systematic – process, and not a one-time procedure, or a final stage of software development. At least it shouldn’t be. Some of the benefits of the properly performed QA include:

• preventing errors in software and making it better in every way,
• performance, functionality, and reliability enhancement,
• increased customer satisfaction and trust,
• improving user experience,
• cutting maintenance costs,
• avoiding financial consequences of bugs and security breaches,
• greater profitability as there are many customers willing to pay more for greater quality,
• ensuring regulatory compliance.

In turn, the consequences of not taking care of QA in software development – or regular quality monitoring – properly can be truly severe and devastating for the entire company. Unfixed or unprevented security threats can lead to major security breaches, as well as the loss of customer’s trust and money which can eventually lead to bankruptcy. Neglecting QA leads not only to higher costs, but also to potential project failure. When defects go undetected, they lead to costly fixes and potential damage to the company's reputation, ultimately increasing the risk of project delays or failure.

We asked Mateusz Konieczny, Tech Evangelist and Full Stack Deveolper, about the importance of QA in the deployment process. You can find sights from Brainhub experts, as well as quotes, learnings and survey results from 75 other global CTOs and Tech Leaders, in our report: "From Vision to Code: A Guide to Aligning Business Strategy with Software Development Goals".

Various approaches to software quality assurance processes

The testing process is always important, but it’s getting even more crucial when a company scales up, the team gets bigger, and tasks get modified frequently. When everything gets more complicated and interconnected, it becomes even more vital to make sure we’re on the safe side. Leaving a bug unfixed at this stage – when things are growing fast – can be detrimental to the software and the entire company. Plus, it’s good to take feedback early to make sure the right decisions are made. Also, it’s crucial to take the most appropriate approach in a given case. Some of the major approaches to quality assurance of software include: 

• unit testing,
• integration testing,
• regression testing,
• compatibility testing,
• functional testing,
• performance testing,
• visual testing,
• manual testing,
• automation testing.

<span class="colorbox1" fs-test-element="box1"><p>If you, too, care about quality, check out the list of top custom software development companies that put software quality first.</p></span>‍‍

Unobvious solution: Software Engineer in Test

Putting quality first is one of our team’s core values. But manual tests are often not fast enough, limiting the ability to deliver business value quickly. So as traditional QA roles. Actually, dividing roles within the team into testing specialists and software engineers also hinders success. This is where automation plays its part.We discovered this some time ago, but only recently gave it a name: Software Engineer in Tests.

Every engineer should be able to write tests, and every QA should be able to code – and this mixture, well-balanced and flawlessly designed, is a perfect match. In turn, when these roles are separated, a software development process may end up full of quality holes.

Quality assurance in software development should adhere to these rules:

• putting quality – including quality assurance – first;
• keeping the QA and software engineering areas and roles together;
• if these roles are separated, software engineers and QA professionals should work together (learn more about pair testing which led to better speed, quality, and enhanced issue detection);
• developers should always be responsible for the quality of code;
• maintaining existing and developing new automated tests is the responsibility of a whole team;
• automated tests are always prioritized.

“In pair testing, testers deepen their technical understanding, while programmers see the app from a quality perspective. This collaboration boosts communication, knowledge exchange, and streamlines the workflow.”

‍Quality assurance of software is teamwork and a common effort, and not just one of the areas, separated from the others. It underpins all the actions and aspects of our work at every stage. Such an attitude results in delivering software that is of high quality from day one. And this, of course, prevents making patches later on – which usually costs a lot of time and money.

Quality assurance in software development – implementation & best practices

Being aware of the significance and importance of QA in software development is one thing and knowing how to implement it right is another. Here are some of the best practices to make sure quality requirements are met before a product is launched.

Best practice 1: Shifting left

QA should never be seen as a separate testing phase but rather as an immanent part of the product development life cycle. It’s good to adopt a shift-left testing strategy, with the team doing their job (e.g. performance tests, security tests) from the very beginning, making sure quality assurance is always in place. Definitely, QA should not be something to tick off at the end.

Best practice 2: Using Continuous Integration (CI)

When testing software, it’s good to apply the iterative approach to software development with cross-functional teams cooperating closely. Continuous Integration, dubbed the DevOps best practice, lets testing teams detect errors and flaws early, and act accordingly. When testing is integrated into the software development process, you may expect ongoing feedback and code changes to be frequently merged into a central repository.

Best practice 3: Opting for automation testing

Test automation allows us to move faster while maintaining a high level of quality.. As of today, leading automated software testing tools are powerful and versatile – ready to support any reasonable testing strategy. Of course, you should know all the major solutions available in the market to make a good, informed decision.‍‍

Best practice 4: Using plans, checklists, and acceptance criteria

QA in software development should be a neat, well-structured process with no loose ends and nothing left to chance. Proper documentation and checklists are simply a must, as well as clearly defined goals. Test plans, test cases, acceptance criteria, release notes, QA metrics, and bug reports will help you keep on track when it comes to quality software testing.

Best practice 5: Putting end users in the very center

During all the testing procedures, team members must always remember about end users and their future experience when using the software. Making every aspect of interaction with the application smooth, and navigation easy and intuitive is crucial, and test cases created should reflect that. The experience of people with disabilities and impairments should be on the radar, too, and accessibility testing mustn’t be omitted.Best practices can significantly enhance the software testing life cycle, which typically covers six stages that are repeated in each iteration.:

• requirement analysis,
• test planning,
• test case development,
• test environment setup,
• test execution,
• test cycle closure.

‍QA in software development – key takeaways

The importance of QA in software development is immense and should not be underestimated. It affects everything from user experience to software performance, profitability, and reputation. Taking care of software quality is crucial on all levels – including the business one. But to make QA truly powerful, some of the best practices of quality assurance must be implemented. What’s vital, is that they should be embedded in the software development life cycle from the very beginning. And testing must be a crucial part of the software development process. It’s perfect if it takes the form of automated testing. It’s even better when it’s software engineers, and not QA specialists, that perform tests as the QA and software engineering roles should not be separated. At least that’s the way Brainhub does it, believing that every engineer should be able to write tests, and every QA should be able to code.

‍If you experienced quality issues with outsourced projects in the past, turn to better QA practices and contact Brainhub today. 

If you are interested in learning more insights on the importance of QA and DevOps best practices in software development, be sure to check out our report "From Vision to Code: A Guide to Aligning Business Strategy with Software Development Goals".