Why is Quality Assurance Important in Software development life cycle?

The term ‘Quality Analysis’ is not new to software development. It is a crucial part of the product development life cycle. Suppose a software product is released to the customers without including the QA team, and if there’s major or multiple errors in the product, imagine the client’s reaction? Thus QA is not only about finding errors, but also working on all the attributes of a software product. We understand what is QA & now we’re going to see why QA is an important part in a successful product development.

Importance of QA in successful product development

If the quality of the product is good then the user is surely satisfied with the product development. Below we’ve mention the benefits of QA in software development:

• Better Efficiency

The QA team makes sure about the quality of the product. Generally, they create strategies and make innovative additions to products to ensure that the product is constantly satisfying the user’s requirements. When a team avoids QA cycles or software testing, the end product is full of bugs and errors. As a result, developers need to do rework and it is really time consuming. If you are doing rework again and again in the same product and still failing to resolve the bugs completely- your final product is not efficient. With QA, regular testing can solve half of your queries and improve the product efficiency.

• Reduce time to Market

Finding bugs and errors in the early stage of product development life cycle reduces the time to market. In simple words, you’ve already found the bug and you don’t have to wait till something inconvenient happens. Incorporating with better QA, you can make an equilibrium between market timeline and the requirements. Thus by using QA in the early stage you’re improving your efficiency as well.

• Preventive Approach

While doing software development, quality is the thing that you never compromised on. With a preventive approach, software testing can take an optimistic route. You can find bugs that might arise in the near future and resolve them for improving performance, functionality and security. Having a preventive approach helps in finding bugs and errors that might lead to future failures. Quality assurance process ensures that products are updated, it creates a better, high-performing, efficient software product.

• Client demand fulfilment

What is the main purpose of developing software? To satisfy the user that are going to use the final software. The QA team can help you meet the requirements of the clients. It makes sure that the final product fulfills the client demand and development needs. A client wants a fully functional software product that should be scalable, robust, and reliable.

• Product Stability

Every user just wants a software/ application that runs without any interruption, glitches or crashing. The QA makes sure that application is stable for every device and every browser. A continuous testing process helps you to get a smooth & fully functional application with less bugs and errors. QA ensures the stability of the system and offers effective functionality to the user. Thus, QA connects with product stability.

• Improve customer satisfaction

With improving technology , the user becomes smarter. This indicates that if you fail to offer an effective , quality product to the user, you may fail to retain them. With QA, you can build reliable and accessible software. Your QA team has to focus on improving UX- related bugs to attract more customers. With improved UX, user-base and brand reputation increase, thus user satisfaction also increases.

Use Case

While technology and innovative applications have been empowering brands, there are some glitches and bugs that affect the brand value and result in incurred losses. Here are some software glitches/ technical issues that aren’t captured by the QA team.

• RBS payments failure

In june 2015, RBS faced the glitch. Around 6 lakh payments were failed due to the technology fault. Bank’s chief admin officer states that it is just a technology fault, there’s no further detail on the real cause. The same company was in the scenario back in 2012. Where RBS customers had to face an outage due to software glitch, the fine amount was £56 Million at that time.

• Airbus Software bug

In 2015, Airbus issued an emergency alert for checking its A400M aircraft when a report found a software bug that had caused a fatal crash earlier in spain. Before the alert, a test flight in seville had caused the death of 4 air force crew members while 2 were heavily injured.

• Bloomberg London office issue

In April 2016, Bloomberg’s London office faced a software glitch. This came up at a time when the UK’s Debt Management Office (DMO) was about to auction a series of short-term Treasury bills, it was unfortunate. Later in a statement Bloomberg declared that the services were restored and the bug was a result of software failures in the network, resulting in excessive network traffic.

Final Words

Quality Assurance in modern software development cannot be taken for granted. It is important for the organization to invest appropriate time and capital to build Quality Assurance to nullify the bugs and errors in the software. It effectively prevents re-work and future failures.

Blobstation’s Quality Assurance and testing expertise helps organizations in their modern transformation. Our methodology and techniques ensure that apps are totally validated for UX and everything is in their position.