Software Quality Assurance: Why do you require it?

With the fierce competition in the business sphere, it's paramount to have strategic advantage. However, the task apparently seems to be big challenge since an enterprise often grapples with countless core & non-core business objectives. It has been observed that in order to meet the product release date, often testing time is considerably reduced; this greatly hampers the quality of the product. To ensure good-quality product release, most companies today prefer to outsource their software testing assignments offshore.
           
Software Quality Assurance is indeed a positive way to accomplish the ultimate goal of customer satisfaction. Every due care must be taken to locate the bugs in the product and fix the same. Sometimes, a bug is located beneath several functional layers of the product and its effect is minimal on the performance of the product. However, there are certain bugs, which are present on the surface and have major effects such as the ones leading to crashing of data, and eventually bigger losses. Thus, testing needs to be done right from the beginning of software development life cycle to ensure bug-free software release.

Quality Assurance Testing is conducted not only to locate bugs, but also for a variety of other objectives too like performance, confirmatory tests etc. Hence, an apt strategy needs to be devised before attempting Quality Assurance Testing lest it would lead to few or more missed bugs. Hence, answer to the questions "Why we're testing?" and "What we are going to test?" must be with you before you actually get started with the testing process.

Once you're done with figuring out the answers to the two most important questions listed above, you can begin the series of activities to assess the quality and performance of the software product. Both manual and automating testing can be carried out to spot the bugs. After every test run, the located bugs can be sent to the development team for rectifications. Once a batch of located errors gets resolved, the testing team repeats the test runs to validate that those bugs exist no more. Next comes the turn of new errors being pointed out, and the cycle continues until the product quality reaches optimum levels.
Author: Adam George