What is quality assurance? And how can it be good for business?
With limitless smartphone apps and computer software available in the market, users are spoiled for choice. A survey by Braze found that in a week, 45% of users are most likely to churn in search of a better experience. Some of the reasons people may abandon an app include long loading time, poor navigation and complex structure, an excessive amount of ads, freezes, crashes, and other technical failures.
While it’s human to make errors, even in a practice so meticulous as software development, it’s best to have a holistic process in place that sees to it your product is virtually error-free upon launch and stays that way. That is the job of a Quality Assurance Engineer.
Before we delve into the importance of this role for your team, we should get to know two related concepts that are often assumed as synonymous but actually mean different things in the context of software development Let’s define them here:
Quality Assurance (QA) is a holistic process that deals with establishing and administering standards that ensure a product meets requirements set by the product owner, development team, and platforms, plus perceived expectations of would-be users. Some teams don’t consider QA as intrinsic to software creation and relevant only pre-launch. However, involving QA right from the start and present in all other stages of development is critical to the success of a product.
Meanwhile, Quality Control (QC) is a set of corrective activities that carry out the bigger goals and objectives of QA. The goal of engineers assigned under QC is to identify defects in a finished product before it’s made available to users. Their focus is on the output and whether it meets the conditions set by QA for it to be launched.
If QA is proactive, then QC is more reactive. A good QA process helps prevent errors from reaching later stages of development, while QC detects errors after they are pervasive in your product. Taken as a whole, they give software teams a competitive advantage to survive the cut-throat nature of the industry. Explore these benefits:
QA saves time and money. It’s better for an internal (or vendor) team to catch bugs than to let users point them out upon trial. You lessen the risk of turning them away and increase their chances of long-term engagement with a good quality product. It’s also less work for developers to treat errors while they’re still manageable.
QA impacts customer happiness. The best engineers and testers wear potential users’ hats as they evaluate the product. They check everything, from the obvious to the obscure, that a user may run into. This saves the latter the frustration of effort wasted on downloading, installing, and trying out a faulty product. Happier customers mean business kept, which adds to the overall sustainability of a software company.
QA preserves a company’s good name. Whether a product is good or bad will always reflect on the company that makes it. Even with a single piece of software to its name, as long as it does what it needs to, improves as the users’ needs evolve, and breaks less frequently than the competition, a company can build the image of reliability and inspire loyalty among its customers.
QA engineers are as crucial to the software development process as the developers themselves.
Whether you’re building a new team or adding to an already talented roster, looking offshore is a worthwhile consideration.
Get Devs has over 10 years of experience connecting software companies in the US with qualified QA engineers in the Philippines.
Get the process started today by scheduling a consultation.