Need for Software Quality Assurance in Software Development.

Approved

By

Arinze Osakwe

Senior Quality Assurance Engineer

It is one thing to build a software application and it is another thing to ensure that the application works the way it is supposed to. Today’s customers want a robust and easy to use software product that can give them that amazing customer experience they need. As an organization, your aim is to roll out a customer-centric software product that will increase your overall sales and profit. That is why we need Software Quality Assurance.

Software Quality Assurance is the overall software evaluation to ensure that the software product meets and even exceeds the pre-determined quality standard. Software Quality Assurance (SQA) activities consist of the processes, techniques and tools applied by professionals during the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to ensure that the released software product meets the expected quality.

COMPONENTS:

Some of the Components of Software Quality Assurance (SQA) include;

1. Planning — This involves defining the scope, approach and the objectives of SQA activities.
2. Requirement Analysis — This involves analyzing and reviewing the software requirement documents to make sure that it is clear, complete, testable and identifying ambiguities and inconsistencies.
3. Test planning — This involves defining the test strategies, test objectives, identifying test scenarios, designing test cases, determining test environment and the resources required for testing the software.
4. Test Execution — This activity involves testing the software application according to the test plan and documenting the test results.
5. Defect tracking and management — During test execution, defect tracking and management ensures that issues raised are tracked, managed and fixed by the software engineers.
6. Test closure — Once testing or test execution is completed and all issues under defect tracking & management are fixed, test results and report will be documented and testing is said to be closed.

5 Reasons Why We Need Software Quality Assurance in Software Development

1. Customer Satisfaction: Software Quality Assurance helps in building a quality software application which brings about trust and customer satisfaction.
2. Save Money: Defects are easier and cheaper to fix when they are detected early.
3. Quality: The main focus of software testing is to deliver quality products to the clients which in turn promotes customer satisfaction and increase in revenue.
4. Security: The main concern of the digital world today is security. The testing team uses security testing to identify defects and the development team covers the application with adequate security layers.
5. Bug-Free Application: Software product with bugs can make an organization to lose a lot of money and customers. Software Quality Assurance ensures that organizations release bug-free applications to their customers.

Software Quality Assurance helps in improving the overall success ratio of a software application. It also helps to ensure that the application meets all the requirements and has a user-friendly interface with a long-lasting life span.