Quality is a complex term comprising a lot of meanings in a single word. Saying the quality, we mean the product lacks defects, is vulnerable-free, it meets our requirements. The good is made durable and reliable enough to serve or perform the whole lifecycle smoothly. Yet, it is not the end, the quality also ensures that the same product is effective and efficient. Quite an exciting scope of senses, indeed.
As you may guess, in this post, we are going to write about quality, not in its general sense, but about quality assurance in software development area.
Software quality management is intended to ensure the business value of delivered software, meaning an application conforms to requirements for its reliability, efficiency, security, maintainability, and size. Moreover, all the parameters correlate with risk and cost management. Here come three services to achieve the software quality, they are quality assurance, quality control, and testing. These processes are often mixed up and used to substitute each other in general talks, but they are not the same. Let us try to find the clear definition.
Quality assurance (QA) is the process that starts along with the software development. It is intended to prevent issues, and it describes what customer requirements are testable and how. Quality assurance defines the standards, methods and sometimes even models for each stage of a development project. It deals with every phase: software design, coding, user experience, configuration, testing, release and even product integration. As well as everything else that is not mentioned in the list above. The idea is that quality assurance guides the whole project development projects to guard against defects and prevent issues.
Quality control (QC) is the scope of means to check the product, find defects, fix bugs and correct the issues, improve a performance of the software. Usually, quality control service is applied to a ready product. It is also quality control that is aimed to check whether a software performs the way it should and does not execute the functions it is not supposed to.
Testing is aimed to investigate how software works. Engineers set up a testing plan, perform tests, analyze their results, confirm tests’ validity and their verification. Of course, experts create a lot of reports on the work they have done. The test can be automated, or manual; analysis — quantitative and qualitative, both software structure and its functions can be inspected to get the product that meets customer’s requirements and users’ expectations.
To some extent, quality assurance overlaps with quality control and testing, but they should do. They are all software quality management services, which are not about breaking a software or bug finding. The main goal of QA is to prevent errors and avoid outage and to save your budget, efforts, and resources at every moment of your software lifecycle.
Protect your products, don’t waste your money on unnecessary software maintenance or support, include quality assurance in the software development process. Rozdoum QA team can perform as an independent quality assurance company or join to your software development project. Rozdoum’s team expertise is reliable, and in 2016, Clutch has evaluated their software quality assurance services among the top 20 companies in the field. Request for a quote on QA right now.