Software development and Quality Assurance
Nowadays, many organizations rely on software development to build the resources they need to succeed. Very often they have in-house software development departments that manage the development process. As a result, the in-house team is responsible for both coding and quality assurance.
Making an in-house team handle both aspects of software development is not the best approach. Quality assurance is a process that requires skilled and trained experts who can design and execute the best test cases for each software product.
If you have an in-house team in charge of both software development and quality assurance, you might be jeopardizing the quality of your products. It’s best to consider these aspects of the software industry as two separate roles assigned to different teams.
Difference between developers and testers
QA specialists are trained to systematically and efficiently test for any possible issues or weaknesses a product may have. For different reasons, software developers aren't the best candidates for doing QA. Here is why:
Software developers
Developers might be confident that they’re capable of covering every possible scenario without much effort. However, they cannot be their own reviewers. If you want an impartial analysis of your software, it's best to delegate QA to a team other than the people who wrote the code.
Most developers will have a unit test approach to testing, which leaves out issues such as usability, intuitiveness, unexpected uses of the software, etc. As a result, several vulnerabilities are not discovered until end users begin to use the product. These kinds of issues will cost time, money, and further resources.
In big software projects, developers may not be familiar with the finished product as a whole. They also may not understand how all the parts of the application work together. At the same time, the development team will probably have some internal bias about the software they are building. Specialized QA teams provide a fresh, objective point of view.
In-house testers
In-house testing is necessary but insufficient. Usually, developers are not trained to design test cases efficiently. Testers specializing in QA know how to design test cases, execute them, record all results, report the incidences, and document the entire process.
On the other hand, in-house testers are usually further removed from user experience, while QA is much closer to it.
When you establish a partnership with a trusted nearshoring QA organization that is not involved in the production of the software, they will test it more thoroughly and find enhancement possibilities that the developers or in-house testers probably missed.
Other considerations: time, money, resources
It’s essential to know that development is usually much more expensive than QA. When developers do their own testing, QA becomes more costly than it needs to be.
Developers don’t necessarily know the best QA processes, practices, and testing strategies, and this means they will take longer to test their own code. Letting developer teams focus on development rather than also being in charge of testing, will provide all around better results.
Advantages of having a QA partner
QA experts don't just carry out tests, even though this is a large part of their role. They also document the testing process, suggest the best solutions to issues they find, provide a fresh, objective point of view, identify KPIs for product quality, and much more.
Once incorporated into the process, the QA team performs exhaustive tests on the whole system. QA testers perform non-obvious functions that push an application in different directions. Whenever issues are not found the first time around means they need to design tests with further creativity.
When you are ready to scale, the quality of the software needs to be sufficient to support the scaling, or it won’t translate into increased sales. That’s why, in the long run, having a QA team saves time, money, and other resources by minimizing release issues and downtime in production.