How to improve and optimize your QA process?

Having more QA resources doesn’t solve the quality problems, a well-planned QA optimization strategy does. Some companies do not prioritize Quality Assurance as much as Design and Development which eventually results in product failure later. You may have the required resources, the budget, and a QA team, but if you aren’t implementing the right strategies, the outcome would be lackluster.

A lot of research has been done over the years to find the reasons behind the failure of software startups; poor QA during the software development process turned out to be one of the root causes for it. Effective QA helps prevent the release of a poor quality product, yet many turn a blind eye to it. It lies at the center of product quality and ensures constant growth, innovation, and product improvement.

Also Read: Quality Assurance(QA) vs Quality Control(QC)

Today, in this article, we will discuss some of the fruitful ways of QA process optimization, how to make it more efficient, and increase the productivity of your QA team.

QA Optimization- Techniques | Strategies | Best Practices

As far as QA process optimization is concerned, good practices must be in place definitely but they should be rolled out cautiously else they can become a source of trouble. Before marking any changes, one must perform a thorough QA process audit, carefully assess the factors that have shaped the current QA process, and do not forget to take into account the risks that may be triggered by implementing the changes. Moreover, ensure that the changes are rolled out incrementally and effects are continuously monitored.

1. More Integration

It is always a good idea to keep your testing team in the loop right from the development phase. The more you can involve the Quality Assurance team during the product development process, the quicker you can iterate on the feedback shared by them. The involvement of testers at various stages of software development helps identify issues that can prove to be critical later. Don’t delay for the final stage, resolve them when they are easy to fix and require considerably less time. Getting your testing engineers engaged earlier in the development process provides you with an opportunity to release your product on time. Research suggests that companies whose QA team works in tandem with the design and development team are more likely to launch an error-free product earlier than the ones who keep it last in their priorities list. Do make QA a top priority.

2. Iteration Planning

Involving your QA team in the iteration planning or sprint planning also helps in QA process optimization or to improve the QA operations. The objective of iteration planning is to determine how much of the team backlog the quality team members can commit to delivering during the upcoming iteration. In other words, the purpose is to finish the set of top-ranked backlog items. QA team members can be of great help when it comes to product backlog refinement as they do a good job at understanding business requirements from the users’ point of view. Furthermore, they are very well aware of the software’s technical dependencies. So, in order to eliminate the contradicting and unclear requirements, involve the Quality Assurance team in the clarification and prioritization of the backlog items and allow them to check the existing and recently created requirements and user stories for consistency, clarity, traceability, and testability.

3. Automate Tasks

Try automating the tasks which are repetitive and can be analyzed by automated means. This doesn’t mean automating everything but finding small, quick wins which can be implemented with little fanfare, and it doesn’t have to be complex or costly. Automate mainly those that are time-consuming when tested manually or need to be executed several times across development cycles.

Test automation can accelerate the testing process and improve software quality to a significant extent. However, automation testing will most likely succeed if the efforts invested into design, development, and test automation scripts are less than what has been put into manual test execution. The other thing that contributes to the success of test automation is the careful selection of automation candidates. While it is easy to automate those test cases that are executed at regular intervals and do not change much with each iteration, automating test cases that are complex and frequently executed demands more effort.

Automation testing adds value to your QA process because it provides your team with the time to execute highly complicated tasks for business and application development.

4. Conduct Formal Technical Review

A Formal Technical Review or FTR is a QA activity performed by software engineers. The objective is to find logical and functional errors in the product, to verify that the product or software meets the specified requirements, is presented as per the defined standards, and to review the uniformity in the software. group meeting between software engineers where they. In other words, the QA team compares the code with the initial requirements.

FTRs are usually performed on mature products. The development team reports their results while the QA team ensures that they align with the standards. Each review report concludes with a score, people who reviewed the product, and what findings or decisions were achieved.

An FTR comprises mainly two types of reviews- a walkthrough and an inspection. A walkthrough is where the reviewers assess the source code of the product and its documentation and is held to detect bugs in the code. Inspection checks for the additional properties of the product as per the requirements and cross-verify if the earlier bugs are still present.

5. Create a test data management strategy

If you are working on an application that is critically dependent on data, such as a BI application, it is recommended that your testing engineers form a test data management strategy early on. Allow the testing team to formulate data requirements- the volume of the required data set, the data format, and boundary values, and then figure out an approach to test data generation based on the data requirements. The approach can be as follows:

Cloning data from production- It is very easy to implement but time-consuming mainly because of large production data volumes.

Sub-setting data from production- This method is a bit economical compared to the first one but demands skills resources to ensure data integrity.

Generating synthetic test data- This ensures that no sensitive data protection is disclosed but is generally time, effort, and resource-intensive.

6. Update test design documentation frequently

To achieve testing quality, every meaningful change marked in a product or software should reflect in the test design documentation. Ensure all the related information including design specifications and support documentation is available and accessible to the QA team in a common place. At the beginning of every sprint, let your QA team evaluate how the implemented changes affected the current test design documents. Doing so will help remove duplicate and irrelevant test cases and they can figure out which test cases need to be updated.

7. Adopt Continuous Testing

A study by Forrester reported that organizations that utilize the Agile or DevOps model and have a continuous testing process have tasted more success in development than organizations that used less -structured development methods. By implementing continuous testing, using end-to-end testing, and testing early in the product development process, you will be able to make your testing process more efficient and effective. But unfortunately, not many companies have the continuous testing process in place even though it possesses some great benefits.

8. Use Effective Communication Tools

Last but not least, if you want to optimize your testing process, it is imperative to integrate effective chat or communication tools so that your QA team members spend more time focusing on testing the software quality rather than emailing designers, developers, or other stakeholders with insignificant issues. Not only does it simplify communication but also creates a smooth communication flow between QA testers and the other team members involved in the software development process, resulting in increased productivity.

Having communication tools like Teamwork, Slack, can be quite effective for that matter.

The Bottom Line

Improving the product or software quality has arguably a major impact on your business and its financial performance. If you think about saving on testing, it could eventually prove to be a critical and expensive deal later. We suggest you focus on the above-mentioned tips, techniques, strategies, or whatever you want to call them, for QA process optimization. If you do not possess the core competency in QA, we would suggest outsourcing QA services. We, at Dew, have the skills and expertise to handle your QA tasks and challenges effectively and efficiently. Keep your entire focus on product development and eave your QA challenges on us.

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