What is Quality Assurance and Why is it important?

 

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is a type of process that ensures methods, activities, engineering processes of software, and work items are monitored and comply with the defined standards. These standards are globally set and defined by the international private ad governmental organization. The SQA standards are one or a combination of ISO 9000, CMMI, ISO 15504 and some others.

Quality Assurance (QA) is any systematic process of determining whether a product or service meets specified requirements.

Elements of Software Quality Assurance:

There are 10 essential elements of SQA which are enlisted below for your reference:

1.      Software Testing for Quality Control

2.      Software Engineering Standards

3.      Technical Reviews & Adults

4.      Error collection & analysis

5.      Change Management

6.      Educational Programs

7.      Vendor Management

8.      Security Management

9.      Risk Management

10.  Safety

Software Quality Assurance Techniques:

There are several techniques for SQA. Auditing is the major technique that is widely used by professionals. These techniques and others such as Quality Assurance Course Certification, QA Specialists courses, IT training courses, QA manual testing, QA Automation Testing, and Software Quality Assurance. Skylineittech is a well-reputed training institute in the US that is well-known for QA Automation Testing, Software Quality Assurance and Quality Assurance training,

There are many techniques for Software Quality Assurance as follows:

1.      Auditing

2.      Reviewing

3.      Simulation

4.      Standardization

5.      Static Analysis

6.      Code Inspection

7.      Design Inspection

8.      Functional Testing

9.      Standardization

10.  Static Analysis

11.  Walkthroughs

12.  Path Testing

13.  Stress Testing

14.  Six Sigma

Software development methodologies have been developed gradually that depends on SQA, which includes Waterfall, Agile and Scrum. Each process focuses to enhance work efficiency.

Waterfall: This is a linear approach to software development. It is a sequential process that usually includes gathering requirements, formalization of a design, implementation of code, and code testing.

Agile: It is a method for software development where each step in the process is approached as a sprint. It is quite adaptive yet less predictive.

Scrum: This is a combination of processes in which developers are divided into teams to handle specific tasks and these tasks are divided into several sprints.

Importance of Quality Assurance:

The question that arises, why is Software Quality Assurance is important? Makes us answer this question.

The importance of the SQA could easily be understood as follows:

·       Saves finances

·       Surety of Security

·       Customer Satisfaction

·       Maintains the product quality

·       Maintains standards and reputation

SQA systematically determines patterns and the actions needed to improve development cycles. Quality assurance has a defined cycle called the PDCA cycle or also known as the Deming cycle. There are 4 phases of this cycle as follows:

Plan: The Company must plan and establish the needed process about the objectives and develop strategies needed to provide top-quality products.

Do: At this phase, it is time to apply the devised plan and build testing of processes. At this stage, strategies improve efficiency.

Check: Monitoring of processes, modify the functions check whether it meets the pre-set goals.

Act: At this stage, the necessary actions are implemented to determine that if a product or service is performing as intended or programmed.

Hopefully, the afore-mentioned information must have cleared any confusion about what is quality assurance and why is it important? Quality assurance is the need of the day and it will remain so in the coming future.