Quality assurance is used in different industries to enhance the quality of products. The process of quality assurance includes testing, improving and maintaining the quality and performance of certain products, and that is true for software products as well.
In a software development team, there are quality assurance engineers, who are also called testers. Those engineers are entirely dedicating their time to proactively detecting bugs and issues of all types within the software. Then reporting them to developers to resolve them, and following up with their resolution until delivering the product as polished as possible.
If you are wondering why you can’t just let developers handle this, and why a quality assurance process is essential with dedicated testers, here are the top reasons behind this.
Reducing development cost and time
Instead of having to pay for a dedicated test or quality assurance engineer. Why not save the money and let the developers do it?
The world of software has become very big that both development and testing have become two different fields of specialization. There are even specializations inside software development, with a lot of different technologies and languages.
This means that one can never be an expert in everything. Having professionals for each task means that everyone knows how to handle their job more efficiently, leading to more efficient development with lower costs and in less time. Quality assurance professionals are dedicated to delivering a high quality product and they know how to do it.
Delivering a higher quality product
As testers spend most of their time detecting and analyzing bugs and issues, they become better than anyone in doing this job, and they can definitely detect things that not anybody would notice.
You can dedicate the quality assurance process is a whole process in the development cycle to making the product better, and with less flaws.
It never relies on having any type of developers, as testing tales different skills, and it takes a lot of time. By using agile methodologies, the testers work more proactively on detecting bugs as soon as you developed a feature. Thus, leading to higher efficiency.
Making the final product more secure
Quality assurance isn’t just related to delivering a smooth and bug-free product, but also a secure one. Of course, security is partially relying on applied best practices and the expertise of developers. But quality assurance and testing play a critical role for ensuring the product is secure and detecting its flaws.
The security of your software product should be one of your biggest concerns. As a single data leak can ruin a whole company. After your data leak, it is impossible to reverse what had happened. But during development, you always have a chance to invest in security.
Increasing the software product usability
Quality assurance doesn’t only ensure the software performs technically great, but also visually works for the users. You can the usability of the product as part of quality assurance and testing, to ensure the solution can be easily navigated.
You can also test it to ensure its accessibility to people with visual, hearing, cognitive or motor disabilities. So that it works for everyone.
Boosting user satisfaction and company reputation
Like any product in the world, users of a software product will have the upper word in determining. Whether they like it or not, and their opinion will clearly and quickly reflect on sales, retention and usage behavior.
Software testing and quality assurance focus on delivering a product that delivers great performance with more speed and stability. Meaning that the user did not frustrated by sluggish loading, unstable features or crashing.
The satisfaction of the users will make them promoters of your software and your company. So you’ll be able to build a great reputation as a high quality product. In the age of the internet, this can happen in a few weeks of launching as feedback spreads as fast as light.
