Quality Assurance Testing: When and Why?
Summary
This blog explains the necessity of QA testing in software development, highlighting its importance in five critical sectors to ensure functionality and reliability.
Quality assurance is an important part of the software development process. It’s the primary method of ensuring your application works as intended and that it meets all of its requirements.
Without quality assurance testing, you could run into issues down the road when users start using your product.
Here are five things that require quality assurance testing.
What is Quality Assurance?
Before we begin, it’s important to understand what QA means.
Quality Assurance is the process of ensuring that a product meets the quality standards of its users. QA is responsible for ensuring that a product is fit for use and meets the expectations of its users.
- Hardware: Your product may be a physical object such as a pen or smartphone. In this case, it is critical that the product functions properly and does not have any defects.
- Software: Software also needs to be tested to ensure that it works properly and meets customer expectations.
- Platforms: A platform is a collection of hardware, software, and data that allows users to interact with each other. Examples include Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet and Apple’s iOS operating system.
- Applications: An application is a program designed for a specific purpose. Applications include games, utilities, productivity software, and many other types of programs.
5 Things That Require Quality Assurance Testing
Now, let’s look at the 5 areas where QA can be especially useful:
1. Internal Business Applications
Internal business applications are particularly prone to quality assurance testing. This is because internal business applications are used to do things like send emails and print documents, perform calculations, and display information on a screen.
QA is performed on internal business applications to ensure that the application is working correctly, ensuring that it meets the requirements of the business (or even exceeds them), and making sure that it’s easy to use for end users.
External business applications are also prone to QA testing. This is because external business applications are used by end users outside of the company, such as customers and clients.
External business applications are tested by end users who will use them so they can provide feedback about how easy it is to use and what improvements need to be made before they can go live.
2. Online eCommerce/Retail
One of the most popular uses for QA testing is for eCommerce and retail applications. This is because these applications are often complex, with a lot of moving parts that need to be tested thoroughly to ensure they are working properly.
This includes checking the following:
- Shopping carts
- Website payments
- Online order processing
- Customer service portals (i.e., live chat)
- Billing systems
QA testers also use their skills to test software that is used in other industries, such as healthcare and finance.
This type of testing often requires special knowledge about how these industries work, which means it’s not always easy for someone outside the industry to find a job in this field.
While there are many different types of software applications in use today, QA testing is generally used to check for bugs and errors in them. This type of testing also is used to ensure that new features work as expected, and it can be applied to both web-based applications (i.e., websites) and desktop software.
3. Medical/FDA-Regulated Software Quality Assurance
The FDA requires extensive testing of any device that is being brought to market to ensure that it meets strict safety standards.
This is because medical devices are used in the treatment of humans and animals. If they fail to perform as intended or cause harm, the consequences can be severe and sometimes even fatal. The process is similar whether you are testing a software product or a medical device.
The key difference is that with medical devices, the quality assurance and testing process must be more rigorous than with most other types of products.
These are but a few examples of the many types of products that require quality assurance and testing.
- Medical/FDA-regulated software quality assurance
- Medical device software testing
- Medical device development
- FDA device compliance
4. Financial
Financial services are no exception to QA testing requirements. They’re often a major driver of the process. Financial services help people make money using their assets or those of others, as well as provide investment advice and insurance services.
Without adequate QA testing, investors can lose their life savings or become saddled with crippling debt that they may never be able to pay off. The consequences of this kind of mistake would be devastating for everyone involved.
Financial services companies are also required to adhere to strict regulatory standards. This means that they must maintain a certain level of compliance, including QA testing.
Failure to do so could result in fines or even criminal charges brought against the company and its employees.
5. 3rd Party Integration
3rd party integration refers to the connection between various applications, and you need to test this because it can be complex. This type of testing is also called integration testing and can check how different components interact with one another.
While QA has been around for a long time, the exact definition of quality assurance is still up for debate among business leaders. It’s important to understand what QA is before learning about its many benefits in your company. Testing is an important part of software development because bugs found early on will save you both time and money.
However, manual testing can take up a lot of resources – which means automated testing tools are necessary if you want to maximize efficiency while minimizing costs!
Conclusion
Quality assurance testing is an important part of any software project. It ensures that your app will be secure, reliable, and bug-free. Many types of testing need to be performed before a product is launched. Here are just a few examples:
- Manual Testing
- Unit Testing
- Automated Testing
- Regression Testing
At Hurix Digital, we understand the importance of performing quality assurance testing on all of our client’s projects to ensure that they meet the highest standards. Contact us today at marketing@hurix.com to learn more and find out how we can help.
Associate VP of Technology, leads the design and development of innovative and accessible web solutions for publishing and eLearning clients. With over 20 years of experience in the ITES industry and a strong background in project management, automation, quality assurance, and offshore collaboration.