Quality plays an integral part in making a business successful whether it is small or large. It is essential to maintain security, functionality, and other important components of the product delivered in order to build customers trust and meet their evolving demands.
Usually, large companies employ entire teams of testers to conduct quality testing. However, small businesses or startups have a low budget for developing software and thus they don’t hire an exclusive testing team to carry out testing at different phases of the product development. This may lead to serious issues and can impact the overall functioning of the software delivered. Therefore, quality assurance is the most imperative step in software development and also helps startups acquire a customer’s trust to achieve success.
How a Good QA Structure Promotes the Quality of Your Product
Presently, the core idea of QA is not just testing the software at the end of its development, but to test it at each phase so that no bugs are left by the final test. Software testing now requires the involvement of each person associated with the product; be it developers, designers, clients, or consumers. Therefore, modern QA states that quality is not the sole responsibility of one person. The role of testers is evolving with the drastic changes in the industry.
So the question here is, how can you develop a good QA structure to address the growing advancements in the software development life cycle? Developing a consistent and functional methodology for quality assurance helps you obtain more understanding of testing the product and also encourages proper testing with no glitches.
Why Quality Assurance Is Given Adequate Emphasis before a Product Launch
According to Kanika Vatsyayan, VP Strategist at BugRaptors, “Quality assurance is the base, or we can say, the crucial element that can lend a hand in establishing a startup in the market. Besides the fact that most of the startups aren’t funded well, many of them end up testing products without hiring professionals.
You can’t just ignore the importance of professional software testing and quality assurance when you are about to step into the digital world. Your product must cater the audience’s expectations and should be the one that can ensure security and stability.
Expert testing of an application or a website involves certain checks that you can’t expect from manual testing approach itself. Loopholes and performance-related glitches can be resolved through precise monitoring of your product using standardized automation testing tools.”
QA Strategy for Startups
Use the MVP Approach
MVP (minimum viable product) is a development and testing approach in which a new product of a startup is developed with minimum features and released to the market as early as possible to maintain and test its value and development statistics. This kind of testing allows the organization to reduce the chances of project failure and delivers quality software to satisfy potential customers.
Later, the whole set of features is embedded into the software after getting feedback from the initial users of the product.
MVP approach is usually preferred by businesses or startups that want to reduce costs and make minimum use of resources in the development and testing of the product. MVP tests are designed with an objective to evaluate the feasibility of the product’s value proposition along with the technicalities of the product. Thus MVP helps you save money and withstand fewer losses in case of project failure.
Try to Engage Everyone in the QA Process
If you have sufficient budget to hire a dedicated quality assurance team, you are already near to success. However, many startups and small-scale businesses may not be able to afford dedicated resources to test a software product.
Therefore, startups usually face issues in testing their software product and are unable to ensure whether it meets the quality standards or not. So what’s the solution to it? Well, involving everyone in the testing process can solve the problem. So everyone associated with software development including developers, business analysts, sales managers, and even consumers must contribute to the testing process.
These individuals can evaluate the functionality and operation of the product while developers can work on the feedback and make any changes to fix the issues encountered and ultimately offers a positive experience to the end users. Including everyone in testing efforts makes your QA process more efficient and delivers quality results in the finished product.
Follow Agile Testing Methodology
You can consider investing in agile testing process wherein communication and collaboration is an imperative part of a software development process. Also, test management helps in fostering these practices. Even if you have a small business, test management tools easily adjust according to your business, and you don’t have to pay for any further support.
With agile testing, test cases can be scheduled, and testers can identify and fix the defects immediately after being notified about them. This will help the testing team quickly fix the bugs and deliver polished and perfect software free of any hitches.
Choose Automation Testing to Increase the Efficiency of Software Testing
Automation testing is another good strategy that startups must consider. It helps in eliminating repetitive test cases and also allows the testing team to spend their time and resources on GUI and exploratory testing process.
Therefore, automation testing is the best way to increase the efficiency of your testing and allows coverage of nearly all the modules of the software.
Automation testing tools have the potential to replay pre-recorded actions and match the output with estimated behavior and notify the failure or success of the tests conducted.
The tasks that are impossible to carry out with manual testing can be easily done through automation testing. Hence, many small and big organizations consider automated testing an essential strategy to develop successful software projects.
Focus on the Most Problematic Areas
Generally, some parts of the product developed are completely functional while others may have some issues while performing a particular task. So if you have a small deadline for the project you can’t just test every piece of code, so it’s important to prioritize testing for the weakest areas of the software that may cause problems in the future. This is how you can reduce the chances of failure and can make your product more functional and bug-free.
A Bug Report Should Be Effective
Make sure you craft a good bug report that clearly conveys all the bugs and errors and help the testing engineers to conduct testing accordingly without wasting their time and resources. If a report is not written properly, it can lead to serious issues in the testing process.
There are some guidelines that must be followed to create a well-built bug report. A bug report should contain all the necessary information needed by the QA team and the developer, and it should also provide solutions to the problems if possible so that testers can get the idea and perform testing accordingly.
Conclusion
If organizations and startups follow the above QA strategies and structure, it will surely lead to successful software development and also helps small companies build the trust of the customers by delivering a quality product to the market that works efficiently.
So if you want to emerge as a growing startup and achieve your business goals, you must focus on the quality of your products. Testing is the fundamental part of any software development; thus, following a right QA structure is important to keep your organization evolving.
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