Software quality is at the core of any software application’s success among end-users. With more than 8.93 million apps worldwide on the market today and many more on the web, desktop, and other digital platforms, it is becoming increasingly difficult for software providers to maintain user engagement for long periods of time. In addition, any security or product quality issues can quickly turn off the app audience. That’s why businesses that develop software professionally always incorporate software testing and quality assurance services into their software development process. Having a quality assurance (QA) team is essential for building a safe and effective solution, but quality assurance goes beyond software testing. In this post, we will discuss what software quality management (QM) is and what processes are used to guarantee high quality and security standards in software solutions.
What is Software Quality Management?
Software Quality Management (SQM) is a comprehensive approach to ensuring that software products and processes meet specified requirements and adhere to quality standards. It encompasses various activities and processes aimed at achieving and maintaining a high level of quality throughout the custom software development company UAE lifecycle. Key aspects of software quality management include:
- Quality Planning: This involves defining quality objectives, standards, and processes for the project. It includes determining quality assurance activities, quality control measures, and the allocation of resources.
- Quality Assurance (QA): QA activities focus on preventing defects by establishing processes, standards, and methodologies. It involves activities such as code reviews, requirements analysis, process audits, and ensuring adherence to established quality standards.
- Quality Control (QC): QC activities involve monitoring and testing software products to identify defects and deviations from quality standards.
10 Techniques to Improve Software Quality
Improving software quality involves various techniques and practices throughout software development. Here are some techniques commonly used to enhance software quality:
- Requirement Analysis and Management: Ensure clear, detailed, and unambiguous requirements are gathered and documented. Use techniques like user stories, use cases, and requirements traceability to manage and track requirements throughout the project.
- Code Reviews: Conduct regular code reviews to identify bugs, coding standards violations, and design flaws. Peer code reviews help improve code quality, knowledge sharing, and collaboration among team members.
- Automated Testing: Implement automated testing practices such as unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing. Utilize testing frameworks and tools to automate the execution of test cases, improve test coverage, and identify defects early in the development cycle.
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Adopt CI/CD pipelines to automate the build, test, and deployment processes. Continuous integration ensures that code changes are regularly integrated into a shared repository and tested automatically, while continuous deployment automates the deployment of code changes into production environments after passing tests.
- Static Code Analysis: Static code analysis (SCA) is a set of tools that analyze source code for bugs, security issues, and code standards violations. SCA tools help identify problems early in the development cycle and promote coding best practices.
- Performance Testing: Conduct performance testing to evaluate the responsiveness, scalability, and stability of the software under various load conditions. Performance testing helps identify performance bottlenecks and ensures that the software meets performance requirements.
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Involve end-users in the UAT process to validate whether the software meets their expectations and business requirements. User feedback during UAT helps identify usability issues and ensures that the software delivers value to stakeholders.
- Continuous Monitoring and Feedback: Implement monitoring solutions to collect real-time data on application performance, availability, and user behavior. Continuous monitoring allows teams to proactively identify issues, gather feedback, and make data-driven decisions to improve software quality.
- Agile and Iterative Development: Embrace agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban to iteratively deliver working software in short iterations. Agile practices promote collaboration, adaptability, and responsiveness to change, leading to higher-quality software.
- Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Maintain comprehensive documentation to provide guidance on software architecture, design decisions, and usage instructions. Encourage knowledge sharing among team members through code comments, wikis, and regular team meetings to ensure a common understanding of the software.
Techniques to Improve Software Quality
Test Early and Automate
Testing early and testing often are two best practices that have been part of the software development process since developers started moving away from the waterfall model. Both are based on the principle that the sooner a bug is found and fixed, the more cost-effective it will be at later stages of development. The sooner software developers embrace testing early in the development cycle, the more effective the final product will be.
The Test early principle enables Quality Assurance (QA) experts and software developers to develop tests from the very beginning of the development cycle. However, over time, the number of tests increases and the implementation of the test principle becomes almost impossible. This is where the automation principle comes in. With automation, QA experts and software developers can perform routine testing activities over time, gradually increasing their test coverage and guaranteeing product stability and correctness.
Implement Cross-Device and Cross-Platform Testing
Cross-platform and cross-device testing are critical processes for apps that are intended to run on multiple devices and platforms. Through cross-device testing, software and quality assurance (QA) professionals validate whether the solutions developed run well across different web browsers and devices, such as desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones. As more solutions are designed to run on multiple web browsers, OSes, and mobile devices. Special testing tools enable software developers and quality assurance (QA) experts to quickly assess whether the developed applications are simply scaling to different platform needs and if they are able to work seamlessly across devices.
Use Quality Controls from the Beginning
Quality controls are implemented early in the software development lifecycle to improve risk management, reduce development expenses, and build an application that aligns with product and quality needs. As a result, quality assurance (QA) experts focus on quality control and test documentation development before the development lifecycle.
Software Requirements Specification Document (SRS): This typically includes functional requirements as well as non-functional ones.
Test Driven Development (TDD): This is often done when a collection of unit tests serves as documentation for written code.
Leverage CI/CD
The Continuous Integration/ Continuous Deployment pipeline is a software development process that automates the software delivery while maintaining high quality. The CI/CD pipeline includes several stages, such as code-writing, product testing, and deployment of new software versions.
CI/CD pipelines are commonly used in Agile and Extreme programming, as well as many other software development methods. CI/CD pipelines set the standard for code reviews, the use of automated testing instead of manual testing, source code being released only after the necessary tests have been passed, and other quality application development activities.
Create a Quality Management Plan
Having clear requirements for product development documentation is great, but it’s not enough. Quality assurance and control (QA) teams, as well as software development companies in Dubai, need a well-thought-out quality management plan (QMP) to effectively enforce and deliver product testing.
Developing a Quality Management Plan (QMP) is the first step in any software development journey. It helps avoid many development failures before software developers even begin coding. A good QMP should define an acceptable level of product quality and outline the steps that software developers and quality assurance (QA) experts should take to achieve it. An effective QMP should include, but not be limited to, the following: Quality standards Product quality expectations Roles and responsibilities Growth goals and timeline Testing strategy Test plan Test cases Testing tools
Review, Revise, Remember
To provide quality support for digital solutions, a lot of focus is put on the tools and processes that are used in the testing process. That’s why software development services and quality assurance teams adopt the best tools and techniques in their work. To do this, they:
- Review – continuously review their testing standards and error-handling approaches. This ensures that all the defects and issues found during the development process are effectively fixed and controlled.
- Revise – after each project, QA and software development companies look back at the development process and consider which quality assurance approaches could be improved and which ones worked best.
- Remember – is the practice of keeping a record of positive and negative experiences and considering how the acquired from the previous experience quality assurance activities can work in the upcoming project.
Communication is a Key
Communication is one of the most important components of quality assurance. UI/UX designers work alongside software developers and QA experts, as well as business analysts. There are a lot of different team members involved in the development process of a software product. Therefore, good communication is essential. This can come in many forms. For example, software quality assurance key performance indicators (KPI) can be made available to all team members; feedback can be given to the development team and QA team to make sure all expectations are met; code reviews and test case reviews can be held; quality assurance discussions with customers can be held, and so on.
Conclusion
Software quality assurance (QA) is a critical component of software development that goes beyond the detection and remediation of critical defects. To create effective software quality management (QM) processes, companies need to build QA teams.
If you’ve got an already developed digital solution or you’re in the process of building one and it seems like you’re lacking well-established quality assurance practices, then you can always find a team of strong QA specialists at Scand. Our QA experts have worked on various software development projects where they’ve acquired the best software testing practices and quality assurance approaches.
No comments yet