Learn how to measure the quality of your product
QA is all about making software the best it can be. To achieve that, the first step is to understand where the team and the product development stand in terms of quality and quality practices.
One of the most critical factors in keeping customers and building trust is quality. From the product itself to the communication workflows and support services, users expect bug-free products that work correctly.
These are the five crucial aspects of every software: reliability, performance, security, maintainability and code quality, and delivery rate. Quality assurance will help you figure out where you stand in these five key areas, and enhance whatever needs to be enhanced. Remember that throughout the development process high quality should be the number one aim.
Reliability
This concept refers to the level of risk inherent in a software product and the probability that it will fail. It also addresses "stability": how likely it is for the code to "break" when new capabilities are added to the software. Measuring reliability reduces and prevents severe malfunctions and errors that negatively affect user experience.
Performance
How effective is your software with respect to time constraints and allocation of resources? The essential elements that contribute to an application's performance are the source code, software architecture, and the components within that architecture.
Nowadays, performance is critical as web and mobile applications demand high performance, and users become quickly frustrated if a system does not respond as they expect.
Security
In the context of software quality, security reflects how likely it is that hackers might breach the software, interrupt its activity or gain access to sensitive information due to poor coding practices and architecture.
Users rely on software to perform sensitive operations related to their personal lives and businesses. Therefore, the software's quality is higher if it is less vulnerable to security breaches.
Maintainability and code quality
Software maintainability is the ease with which software code can be repaired, improved, and understood. High maintainability makes software adaptable to other purposes, portable between environments, and transferable from one development team to another. Maintainability is closely related to code quality. High quality coding will produce easily maintainable software.
Delivery rate
A new version of your software will typically contain improvements that can impact the user experience. A higher frequency of releases that are delivered to the user should in theory mean that the user gets better software faster.
So, how do you ensure software quality during development?
Benefits of including a QA team from the beginning of the development process
The development team and the quality assurance team work together: together, developers and quality assurers maintain, measure, and constantly improve the software quality. The QA team does product testing at different points in the production process, based on the development methodology used.
In this way, not only is quality ensured, but also the QA team provides new insights for the development, allowing developers to create more innovative products, increase customer satisfaction, save time on regressions or old code review, and enhance quality practices as your product evolves.
For these reasons, we strongly encourage you to take advantage of incorporating a QA team from the beginning of your development processes.
But, What can you do if you didn't include a QA team from the beginning?
Don't worry; there are other options.
How a software QA audit plan could enhance your software quality
A software QA audit plan will provide information on whether your software is up to market expectations and how to take it there.
uqality offers an audit plan that includes reviewing the crucial aspects of your software with a set of test cases. It ensures that best practices are implemented and followed, and proposes a plan to maintain testing infrastructure, recruit and train the best resources, and manage your quality assurance costs.
At uqality, we fully review your quality practices working directly with you to identify any departures from best practices. With the test cases and plans we create, our audit plan provides additional training and user documentation. The results give you all the information you need to understand application functionality and its integration points.
Making an exhaustive analysis of your software will mark the difference between your products and your competitors'.