Engineers perform software quality assurance (SQA) throughout the software development life cycle; the process runs parallel to software development. Folks often confuse SQA with software quality control, a corrective technique aimed at identifying and correcting defects in a software work item. Instead, SQA is a preventive technique that provides methods for preventing errors by ensuring everyone working on the project follows those methods closely.
What Are the Benefits of Software Quality Assurance (SQA)?
- Reduces Costs: SQA reduces the cost of your software projects and helps you achieve optimal project timing. An effective SQA process helps developers discover problems at the earliest possible moment. Therefore, solving these problems requires far less time and money in the long run.
- Ensures Competitiveness and Trustworthiness: Software architects carefully examine each building block in the software development process against industry standards.
- Protects Your Brand: Prior to introducing a product to the market, businesses must guarantee that it functions as planned. Your brand’s reputation and image will be substantially impacted if buyers find the product’s flaws before you do.
What Are Software Quality Assurance’s Activities?
Create a Software Quality Assurance Plan
This activity is the first and the most critical activity of SQA. Developing a plan starts with defining the SQA team along with their roles and responsibilities for the project. Then the team develops the audit and review plan along with the schedule for all SQA activities.
Define Checkpoints and Performance Metrics
To evaluate project operations at each level, the SQA team establishes clear milestones and performance metrics. Throughout the life cycle, checkpoints guarantee regular quality assessments.
Define the Standards and the Methods
The SQA team is responsible for defining which policies, standards and procedures the project team should follow during the software development.
Conduct Software Quality Assurance Audits
We perform audits to assess the software development activities against defined standards in order to see the gap and act accordingly. At the end of the audit, the definition of problems and required corrective actions are reported to project stakeholders.
Conduct Reviews
Reviews are less formal than audits but are nevertheless a main activity of the SQA process. The review process follows the software development timeline because the SQA team needs to review each major activity of the development process , including the project planning, software requirements analysis, test and release plan, project closing and more.
Report and Document
Documentation is part of every quality assurance effort. Change requests, test findings, audit results and review reports are all documentation examples. To keep stakeholders informed, the SQA team needs to provide regular reports.
Software Quality Assurance Techniques
Standardization
Software quality assurance relies heavily on standardization. The project team has a clear direction for their software development efforts thanks to standards and guidelines. As a result, we ensure quality by reducing ambiguity.
Review
In the review process, internal and external stakeholders examine the software product and the overall software development process to share their feedback and (hopefully) approval. While management reviews focus on checking progress alongside confirming plans and schedules, technical reviews are conducted solely to assess the software product’s suitability for its intended use.
Audit
Audits are formally structured activities with participants assigned to particular tasks such as lead auditor, recorder or initiator. Software audits determine whether software products and development processes comply with regulations, standards, guidelines and procedures. As a result of the audit, we identify aberrations and take corrective actions.
Code Inspection
Code inspection is a static code verification technique that examines the software code blocks for any errors by executing the program conceptually (without any data). Inspections are usually conducted on one small section of the product at a time to find errors in code, to make sure that code follows the standards and to look for any opportunities for improvement.
Functional Test
Functional testing ensures the functional requirements of the software application are met fully. Functional testing isn’t concerned with the source code; instead, the focus is on how well the application carries out the functions.
