General Quality Assurance: An Introduction

We can also refer to Quality Assurance as QA testing. It is an activity ensuring that organizations will provide the best and possible products and services. The main goal of QA is to improve the process of delivering quality products to customers. Therefore, an organization needs to ensure that its processes are efficient and effective. It should align with the quality standards defined for their software products. 

What is the complete process involved in Quality Assurance?

Quality assurance is following a defined cycle called PDCA. The phases in the PDCA cycles are as follows:

Planning: This phase involves planning and establishing the process related objectives. Aside from that, the determination of the processes required to deliver high-quality end products also needs to determine here.

Doing: In this phase, it involves the development and testing of the processes. If applicable, you can make some changes to the processes. 

Checking: This phase comes with monitoring of the processes.

Acting: It involves implementing actions that are necessary in order to achieve improvements in the processes.

Facts About Quality Assurance

Here are some data that you need to understand about Quality assurance. It is important to completely understand what quality assurance is and the truth behind it.

• Software quality assurance is involving activities related to implementation of processes, procedures as well as standards.
• The scope of SQA applies to all products created by the organization.
• Software quality assurance could also mean preventive techniques and a proactive measure.
• Quality assurance mostly focuses on processes.
• Software quality assurance is all about engineering processes responsible for ensuring quality.

Main Functions of Quality Assurance

Primarily, Quality assurance is for:

Technology transfer: This function is involving obtaining a product design document, trial and error data, and its evaluation.

Validation: QA is useful when validating different software aspects.

Documentation: This function is responsible for controlling the distribution as well as archiving documents. At the same time, it also involves the approval of all types of documents.

Assuring the quality of products: The main goal of QA is for organizations to come up with high-quality products and delivers excellent services.

Quality improvement plan: To improve the plan in order to generate quality products is what QA envisions. 

Best Practices of Quality Assurance

For quality assurance to be effective, it takes a lot of best practices to achieve high-quality results. Here are some of the best exercises that QA maintains to possess just to improve business processes:

• QA creates a robust testing environment.
• They are selecting release criteria as carefully as possible.
• QA applies automated testing to high-risk areas to save money and helps to fasten the entire process.
• They are allocating time appropriately to each process needed.
• They also prioritize bug fixes according to software usage.
• QA forms dedicated security and performance testing team.
• They simulate customer accounts the same as a production environment.

Quality assurance is the one ensuring that the applications we are using today have high quality. At the same time, they are responsible for ensuring that the software is functioning as it should meet user satisfaction. But on the other side, QA is a complex and intricate process. It requires effort, deep-thinking, and good planning to complete their task successfully. All aspects of the business rely on QA. Despite challenges, QA never stops making life easier and better.