What Quality Assurance Delivery Method is Best for Your Company?

When developing new software for your company, it can be hard to brainstorm, implement and finalize the new product in a timely manner. While companies always strive to get the software out to the public as quick as possible, there are prerequisite quality assurance and testing procedures that need to be enacted. These internal development processes must go through multiple levels of expert review to ensure ample productivity, functionality and safety.  

Quality assurance (QA) is a comprehensive process used to test, evaluate, improve, and certify the compliance and operation of software programs, systems, services and applications. Quality assurance helps increase operational confidence in software, while identifying or preventing program mishaps, and ensuring products meet specific standards and expectations. Before a company releases a product to a desired market, they will want to make sure that it runs smoothly on all fronts -- from coding to security. 

What are the Different Types of Quality Assurance Delivery? 

Quality assurance tests can be executed in two main forms: manual or automated. While each of these methods can be used to test a software product, they both provide different methods for assessing technological flaws and integrating improvements.  

Manual Testing - This form of quality assurance delivery is conducted by humans rather than a code or digital tool. It’s useful for evaluating if a program is functionally correct and user-friendly -- while allowing testers more flexibility to simulate real-time behavior. While this testing can be focused on the specific needs of the software, it can become very time consuming, requiring human labor to test every detail. If the software requires small-scale repetitive tasks or specific variable testing, then manual testing is the best direction to go. 

Automated Testing - This form of delivery utilizes scripts and software tools to improve the software programs and systems. It is useful for data-driven testing as it is efficient and known for being consistent when facing large-scale, time-consuming testing scenarios. While this might seem like the go-to method for testing, it can impart a higher cost and increase maintenance requirements. Automated testing is usually the first choice for program testing that requires large amounts of data, with little extraneous variables. Non-extraneous variables include data that can be easily input by a machine, rather than data like customer write-ins that must be handled by hand.  

 How Do You Choose the Correct Quality Assurance Method? 

The first step when developing a quality assurance plan is to evaluate a company’s needs and expectations for a specific online application. Factors that should be considered are the company’s size, project complexity, resource availability, cost, and desired project timeline. All these factors can play a role in the effectiveness of the quality assurance delivery method.  

If you want to get the best results from your software, creating a personalized, hybrid delivery method can help provide a balanced, fine-tuned approach to quality assurance. Combining the benefits of both manual and automated delivery methods can help point out structural flaws and position the company to take a more consumer experience-centric approach. While an automated program can point out data input discrepancies, adding a mix of manual delivery can help optimize the application with respect to the end-user. Introducing the concept of peer-developed software combines both delivery methods, adding more manual reviews to the development process to fine-tune software or application features for quality-of-life improvements after automatic testing has taken care of large-scale, frequent scripts that can be time consuming for actual analysts.  

Another method of quality assurance comes in the form of regression testing. Regression testing is the technique of repeating functional and non-functional testing to ensure that the software still performs well after a modification and the previous version of “clean” code has not been corrupted. The combination of functional testing to look for specific behaviors and non-functional testing to see how the software operates, allows developers to run the changes they make without fully testing the whole program repeatedly. Testing portions of software can save time and can pin-point flaws within a section of code that had just been created. Within regression testing is the process of functional testing, which tests based on specifications that the software must be able to perform. Adding this testing to your quality assurance plan keeps the whole system running smoothly, as well as completing tasks in a timely manner.  

How Can Resolvit help with Quality Assurance Testing? 

When combining manual and automatic quality assurance, Resolvit’s expertise in QA can help create a personalized approach for you and your software.  We help fortune 100 clients implement custom Q/A delivery methods by building a tailored plan providing a full-cycle approach to meeting organizational testing needs. This includes meeting with company developers, discussing specific objectives, mapping out the testing environment and deploying a specialized team. This team of testers, analysts and project managers – along with a background team of developers can be sourced and deployed to document scripts, run tests and identify areas for automation. 

Want to implement a comprehensive Q/A delivery process that expedited time-to-deployment and improved quality? Contact Resolvit today to get started.