Software Quality Assurance: What Is It and Why It’s Important
Software quality assurance is very important when it comes to high-quality software development processes. The more seriously your business takes quality assurance, the better it will be for your company in the long run.
Other than fulfilling the general requirements of your project, there are several other technical standards that your company should meet in order to ensure successful software development. The aim of software quality assurance is to ensure that these requirements are fulfilled.
Though it can be a little tricky to understand how exactly software quality assurance works, you can go about it easily once you understand the basics.
According to Bernard Homes, “Tests are sometimes mistaken with quality assurance. These two notions are not identical: 1) quality assurance ensures that the organization’s processes are implemented and applied correctly; 2) testing identifies defects and failures and provides information on the software and the risks associated with their release to the market”
In this article, we are going to discuss what software quality assurance is, and why it is important for your business.
What Is Software Quality Assurance?
Software quality assurance refers to the method used to ensure that the software development process is going according to plan and that the projects comply with the standards set by the company and the stakeholders. The process takes place at the starting, the middle, and the end of the software development cycle.
It is the responsibility of organizations to the external and internal characteristics and working of software products at a standard quality level. The internal qualities consist of the software’s building blocks, such as code. Whereas, the external qualities are the ones that determine the real-time performance of the software.
The features that are determined to ensure external quality include reliability, maintenance cost, and efficiency. On the other hand, for internal quality, organizations consider readability, structure, codes, complexity, testability, and flexibility of the programs used in the making of software.
The two basic approaches to software quality assurance are:
- the defect management approach
- the attributes approach.
Both of these approaches are discussed below.
Software Quality Defect Management Approach
The very first option; the defect management approach works by detecting and managing defects. There are many elements that fall under defects, which include bad code and poor data handling.
During this process, if a defect is found by your development team, a category is assigned to it based on its severity. Once done, the development team starts working to eradicate the issues to solve the defects.
Most of the time, the development teams design control charts to go about the process smoothly. This helps check and enhance development process capability, which helps examine if the processes are meeting the standards or not.
In short, this approach works by counting and eradicating defects.
Software Quality Attributes Approach
The software quality approach is used to keep in check and maintain several different quality characteristics. The number of characteristics can be six or more, depending on who you ask. This is mostly due to the fact that some characteristics overlap or fall under each other. For example, usability extends learnability and suitability falls under functionality.
Let’s have a look at the 6 main attributes of the software quality attribute approach:
- Functionality
- Maintainability
- Reliability
- Efficiency
- Usability
- Portability
Why Is Software Quality Assurance Important?
Software quality assurance is not only important for the customer, but also for the product itself. It is essential that companies use a reliable SQA process to produce a baseline of what they would want the final product to look like.
SQA provides a way for businesses to ensure that they are able to create and deliver high-quality products. When it comes to ensuring good quality, there isn’t a lot of justification required. The first and foremost reason is that a good quality product helps your business save time, money, and effort in the long run.
As a business, one of your primary goals should be to provide products that are actually worth purchasing. This can be done with the help of SQA. Also, if you don’t ensure the quality of the product during the development process. Then you’re likely to lose money during product development, and there’s no guarantee that you will be getting that money back.
Time, cost, and effort
Other than this, if you are delivering high-quality products, you would also not need to spend much on maintenance later on since your product would be performing well over time. Hence, maintaining the software later on as well would require less time, cost, and effort.
Other than this, to make sure that your customers are satisfied, you need to build a product that is reliable, high-quality, and fulfills their needs. It should have as highly functional features and a few bugs and errors as possible. Through software quality assurance services, you can ensure that your customers are provided with the exact product that they demanded. This helps increase the customer satisfaction rate for your business in the long run.
All in all, SQA is a very important factor in upgrading your business and making sure that your brand has a good reputation in the market.
Why Is a Software Quality Assurance Plan Important?
A software quality assurance plan (SQAP) records the processes, methods, tools, and techniques that are used by your company to implement quality assurance. Though the formats of different SQA plans vary, these are the common ones you would be able to find in all:
- Introduction
a.Purpose
b. Scope - Reference Documents
- Management
a.Organization
b.Task
c. Responsibilities - Documentation
- Metrics, Standards, Conventions, and Practices
- Audits and reviews
The software quality assurance plan is a critical aspect of SQA overall. By implementing this, you can ensure that you wouldn’t need to re-do any of the roles or processes mentioned in the SQAP.
Regardless of the industry, it is essential that records and documentation are stored and followed not only to streamline processes but also to manage the overall workflow, and software development is no different.
Without a well-thought software quality assurance plan – you won’t be able to develop high-quality software products. Similarly, an SQAP helps your company to develop reliable and good-quality products.
Summary of the benefits of Software Quality assurance
- Makes sure the product is fully operational and meets the standards
- save a lot of time, money, and efforts
- improve the user experience much earlier in the process
- ensure that the user satisfaction of using the product is good
- helps ensure that the complete software development process is well-organized.
Conclusion
SQA is very important for almost all businesses that are into software development, regardless of whether they are creating that software for their customers or for themselves.
With the proper understanding of SQA, it can be quite easy for you to implement the process in your business. Though the implementation can be a little confusing, when done successfully, you can reap hundreds of benefits in the long run, which is one of the main reasons you should consider implementing it in your organization.
