A software is developed by passing through a series of steps as part of a software development Quality of life cycle. Each step is an important part in bringing the final Software Development Quality closer to its final objective.
An often-overlooked area of the software development life cycle is software quality assurance. Most organizations simply ignore the importance of software testing and instead focus their resources on other areas of the SDLC process.
Leaving software testing to be done at the very end, when most of the development has been completed. Usually, at this point anything too major cannot be undertaken and a software that is not a 100% is pushed ahead. Without considering the long-term implications to project costs and customer displeasure.
In order to address this issue and help achieve your software development goals for the next big project. We’ve compiled a list of seven effective steps that will improve your software quality and efficiency.
Why Software Quality Assurance is Important?
A software application/product like Call Centre Software is developed keeping in mind certain requirements provided by a customer. These requirements can be of various types that may include business, regulatory, functional and expected quantitative and qualitative requirements. In some cases, businesses proceed with developing the project through methodologies that are static or intolerable to change – for example waterfall.
This does not allow the development process to be agile and incorporate improvements, when suggested later in the development process, as the process itself is one-directional. This increases the chances of certain requirements not being met, or realized very later on in the development stage that would affect the final quality of the product.
Software quality assurance allows businesses to improve the quality of their software by revisiting the initially proposed requirements and cross checking the final product to be performing on those requirements.
Making sure that the product does not have basic errors, defects and other flaws that might otherwise cost an organization down the road. Software testing allows companies to identify potential issues earlier in the development process. Increasing the efficiency of the product while saving the company time and money.
7 Techniques for Improving Software Quality
- Testing should be carried out early and more frequently in the development process. This would allow minor bugs and problems to be spotted earlier and dealt with accordingly. Early testing will allow debugging of issues when they are relatively smaller, less complex and cost effective to rectify
- A companywide culture that supports software quality assurance should be introduced within the development practices of an organization. This will introduce a sense of importance to continuous testing and the realization of it being a vital process in developing quality software products.
- Testing should be agile as the development process itself. Instead of testing being done at the end against predetermined standard test cases. It should be against the initial requirements laid out for the software product to do. This technique will assess the final product against product specific objectives and highlight whether the software is actually performing at par to expectations.
- In order to ensure a quality software, testers should examine code blocks for quality coding practices being performed. This would reduce the chances of vulnerabilities arising from incorrectly written code that could compromise a system if exploited.
- Existing testers should be optimally trained in the latest software & App quality assurance practices, in addition to hiring ‘Subject Matter Experts’ in the relevant area. This would increase their productivity and skilled capacity, to perform with the latest tools and technology for the benefit of the development life-cycle and the company overall.
- In some organizations, testing departments do not hold much authority in halting development. Testers should be given privileges to pause developments if they encounter problems of a similar nature happening repeatedly. In order to prevent smaller issues from growing larger without notice.
- A quality software product is the one that meets all of its functional requirements in addition to requirements from all concerned stakeholders. In order to maintain such quality, having communication between all project members is vital, to receive valuable feedback by all the relevant members and users. Once feedback from all users is gathered and processed, can an accurate estimate to user acceptance and usability be established, to produce a higher quality product.
In the End
Developing a quality software product is a systematic and time-intensive process that follows a series of steps. In order to ensure a quality product is produced, rudimentary and one-directional testing practices would have to be abolished.
As development environments grow agile, software quality assurance needs to incorporate newer practices that will minimize inferior quality software development. Whilst greatly improving the average standards of software quality.
