A QA team obviously improves the quality of your product because they know the product better than anyone else and are constantly continuing to explore it to find functional flaws or defects and UI/UX imperfections. But how do they perform it, how can they achieve a high level of product quality and most importantly - how to understand that it is done appropriately and efficiently?
Why do QA engineers know the most?
Understanding the value of the project, commitment to business goals, and technical skills make QA an indispensable member of the team and a professional who knows your product best.
The QA team does not work only on individual parts of the application; their activity is not divided on the frontend or backend, but on the contrary, they are familiar with the profound logic and implementation of all functionality as they observe daily product evolution and track changes from one to another iteration.
It’s the QA engineers who can provide your marketing team with a comprehensive overview of the product features or assist your customer support team with detailed instructions for any use case.
What is the perfect QA process?
To reveal how the QA team achieves such deep knowledge and results, let’s look at some best practices and pillar principles of perfect quality assurance.
Early testing
The days when the development phase went prior to the QA phase are long behind us.
A modern quality assurance approach favors continuous development and quality control with heavy integration of developers, DevOps, and QA professionals. QA is a part of the design and development processes rather than being a separate phase. Test results are directly incorporated into the design and development work, and quality becomes a guiding principle.
Nowadays, the most popular and business-justified approach that improves the QA process is shift-left testing, and not without a reason. A properly prepared QA team can analyze potential inconsistencies even in the requirements and become the right hand of a business analyst or a product owner. When started in the first stage of SDLC, testing saves everyone time, energy, and money.
Strategic approach
Successful quality assurance means satisfying the strict requirements of the stakeholders and specific target audience. However, reaching this point requires time, effort, and, most importantly, long-term strategy.
A comprehensive testing strategy outlines the testing activities, resources, tools, schedules, and risks, helping make the whole QA process more transparent and manageable.
At the planning stage, the QA specialist analyzes requirements, learns the overall business logic of the project, and identifies relationships between various parts and modules of the project to determine what test design techniques would be the most appropriate at each stage and what tools to apply to achieve the desired results.
Test design
Achieving maximum coverage with minimal effort, time, and resources requires a structured algorithm of actions. The use of test design techniques helps effectively detect errors by defining test scenarios, which are broader than individual test cases and encompass a set of related functionalities or features. Based on acquired knowledge QA Team is prone to ensure comprehensive functionality coverage.
As a result, the testing process itself acquires a new essence because now the QA team has a “smart” suite with singled out test cases. Such an approach contributes to the acceleration of development without loss of quality.
Reasonable automation
Automation has reached its highest point now helping to maximize the effectiveness of your QA team better and to save time in the development and delivery process. Moreover, it will give your development team the courage to adjust the system, confident that any problems will be classified quickly and can be fixed before passing them on to the QA team.
On one of the projects, we added AQA in several sprints after the release to automate regression scenarios because we analyzed that they would not change. We verified them with autotests beforehand for new upcoming releases.
However, it is essential to be careful with over-automating, so it’s critical to define the scope. Let’s look at another case. The QA team worked according to the agile methodology and did not have enough resources to complete all sprint tasks. The product owner decided to add an AQA engineer instead of additional manual QA to cover regression flows. The manual team closed 70% of sprint tasks while the AQA specialist slowly automated some flows that always required updates. As a result, the automation didn’t really decrease load per manual QA, while the effort spent was significant.
The decision to involve automation should be balanced, considering the speed of development, financial resources, and recommendations from the QA team. The QA team should prioritize flows for automation and be able to provide transparent and undeniable arguments in favor of this decision, including not only the best practices but also a comprehensive project analysis.
Identifying skilled resources, tools, and capabilities and effectively leveraging automation will go a long way toward increasing the productivity of QA teams and reducing defects.
Reporting and analytics
Leveraging analytics and setting up QA metrics is one of the critical points for tracking and quality control. The QA team should keep a record of each test performed, as the resulting data can help develop new tests to address problem areas.
The metrics help to ensure an equable load for each team member and assess the results and efficiency of their work, while reposts display alarming places to support software solutions before launching into production, help evaluate general product sanity and the number of issues and potential defects that might arise.
Production testing
The market, technology, and demand constantly change, so it is impossible to stop working on a project after going live into production. A qualified QA team knows how to be well-prepared for this crucial phase and which specifics of testing on the production they can face.
The reality is that the production environment has plenty of peculiarities and new issues can arise that couldn’t be found in the test environment. Some of the reasons can be architecture variability, actual integration endpoints and connections instead of stubs, user segmentation, feature flags, expanded monitoring capacity, and many others.
It's important to plan gradual openings for new features and split them into several iterations. Also, best practice requires a rollback mechanism and a prepared plan to minimize the impact on real users and stabilize the system.
Perfect QA team
Talking about the approaches and best practices in Quality Assurance, we can’t leave the team out of sight. The number of team members, their qualifications, and the overall communication in the team matter a lot and lead your project either up or down.
Team Size
The number of team members may vary depending on the development phase. Usually, it’s about 1 QA specialist per 2-3 developers. The first QA engineer on the project should definitely be experienced and able to lead the QA process and the team. As new members are added, their level may differ, as the QA Lead will manage their work.
By adding new QAs, you enable the continuous rotation of team members through parts of the project in repeated iterative checks throughout the entire development cycle. Why is it needed? This practice allows specialists to take a fresh look and share their expertise and experience, making the process even more efficient and ensuring a higher bug detection rate.
Such a “fresh look” practice can be implemented as an internal activity as part of the QA process or as an external service when you engage an outsourced QA engineer to boost your project.
Communication
Optimal time management requires well-organized communication processes, support of up-to-date testing documentation, and proper task allocation between team members that had been planned by the QA Lead.
The team should have regular meetings to exchange their everyday experience and work around the issues. It’s about quality management, experimenting with new ideas, and switching up testing practices and metrics used where necessary. Though it’s crucial to make the communication sufficient yet not excessive, revealing most of the time for testing activities.
Conclusion
The happy pass described above is impossible to reach on the first days of engaging QA on the project. The quality of your project and its success require time, and the earlier the QA team is involved - the sooner you will have a qualified and competitive product.
Good QA practices and culture are not accidental; they are intentionally built and monitored. I definitely know QA is much more likely to be effective and intentional when it is prioritized at all levels of the organization.
In both business and development, you can't just expect that processes will happen on their own - understanding best practices in the QA process is key to achieving your bussiness goals.