Quality is extremely hard to define, and it is simply stated: “Fit for use or purpose.” It is all about meeting the needs and expectations of customers with respect to functionality, design, reliability, durability, & price of the product.
What is Assurance?
Assurance is nothing more than a positive statement about a product or service that inspires trust. It is the assurance that a product or service will perform successfully. It ensures that the product will perform flawlessly and in accordance with the expectations or criteria.
Quality Assurance in Software Testing
Software testing quality assurance is a technique for ensuring the quality of software goods or services given to clients by a company. Quality assurance is concerned with making the software development process more efficient and effective in accordance with the quality standards established for software products. QA Testing is a popular term for Quality Assurance.
Quality Assurance methodology has a defined cycle called PDCA cycle or Deming cycle. The phases of this cycle are:
- Plan
- Do
- Check
- Act
These stages guarantee that the organization’s procedures are assessed and improved on a regular basis. Let’s take a closer look at the QA Process phases listed above –
- Plan — The organization should plan and create process-related objectives. Also the processes necessary to deliver a high-quality final product.
- Do — Process development and testing, as well as “doing” changes to processes.
- Check – Processes are to see if they achieve the intended goals.
- Act – A Quality Assurance tester should take the steps that are important to improve the processes.
Quality Assurance is useful for an organization to ensure that the product is created and implemented correctly. This aids in the reduction of issues and faults in the final output.
What is Quality Control?
The term “quality control” is commonly the same as “QC.” It’s a Software Engineering procedure that ensures a product’s or service’s quality.
The primary goal of quality control is to ensure that the products meet the customer’s specifications and requirements. QC also assesses people’s skill sets for quality and provides training and certifications. This evaluation is necessary for service-based organizations and aids in providing “perfect” customer service.
Difference between Quality Control and Quality Assurance?
Sometimes people QC mix with QA. The term “quality control” refers to the process of examining a product or service and determining its outcome. In Software Engineering, Quality Assurance is the process of examining and changing the procedures that led to the end-product.
Examples of QC and QA activities are as follows: 
| Quality Control Activities | Quality Assurance Activities |
|---|---|
| Walkthrough | Quality Audit |
| Testing | Defining Process |
| Inspection | Tool Identification and selection |
| Checkpoint review | Training of Quality Standards and Processes |
The tasks listed above are related to Quality Assurance and Control processes for any product. In terms of software:
- QA becomes SQA ( Software Quality Assurance)
- QC becomes Software Testing.
Differences between SQA and Software Testing
Let’s present differences between SQA and Software Testing:
| SQA | Software Testing |
|---|---|
| Software Quality Assurance is about engineering process that ensures quality | This is to test a product for problems before the product goes live |
| Involves activities related to the implementation of processes, procedures, and standards. Example – Audits Training | Involves actives concerning verification of product Example – Review Testing |
| Process focused | Product focused |
| Preventive technique | Corrective technique |
| Proactive measure | Reactive measure |
| The scope of SQA applied to all products that will be created by the organization | The scope of Software Testing applies to a particular product being tested. |
Best practices for Quality Assurance:
- Establish a Stable Testing Environment
- Carefully select the criteria for release.
- To save money, use automated testing in high-risk areas. It aids in the speeding up of the entire procedure.
- Appropriately allocate time to each process
- Prioritizing bugs is critical. fixes that are dependent on the software’s usage
- Form a dedicated staff for security and performance testing.
- Simulate customer accounts in a production-like setting.
Quality Assurance Functions:
There are five main functions of quality assurance:
- Technology transfer entails obtaining a product design document, as well as trial and error data and evaluating it. Documents are disseminated, reviewed, and approved.
- Validation: A master plan for the entire system’s validation is created here. The test criteria for certifying the product and process have been approved.
- Documentation: This role is in charge of document distribution and archiving. Any modification to a document must follow the right change control method.
- Assuring product quality
- Plans for enhancing quality
In the field, there are a number of certifications available to verify that organizations adhere to quality standards. Customers use this as a criterion for picking a software provider.
ISO 9000
This enables the company to provide high-quality service to its customers and other stakeholders. An organization that wants to be certified as ISO 9000 has its functions, goods, services, and procedures audited. Hence the major goal is to review and verify that the organization is following the process as it should be and to see if there are any existing processes that may be improved.
This certification helps –
- Increase the profit of the organization
- Improves Domestic and International trade
- Reduces waste and increase the productivity of the employees
- Provide Excellent customer satisfaction
CMMI level
This enables the company to provide high-quality service to its customers and other stakeholders. An organization that wants to be certified as ISO 9000 has its functions, goods, services, and procedures audited. The major goal is to review and verify that the organization is following the process as it should be.
CMMI has five levels. The maturity of an organization’s Quality Assurance Mechanisms determines its CMMI level 1 to 5.
- – Initial: In this stage the quality environment is unstable.
- – Repeatable: There are some processes which are repeatable. This level ensures processes follow at the project level.
- – Defined: Set of processes are defined and documented at the organizational level. Those defined processes are subject to some degree of improvement.
- – Managed: This level uses process metrics and effectively controls the processes that follow.
- – Optimizing: This level focuses on the continuous improvements of the processes through learning & innovation.
Test Maturity Model (TMM):
In a Testing Environment, this model evaluates the maturity of processes. This model, too, has five tiers, as seen below:
- – Initial: There is no quality standard followed for testing processes and only ad-hoc methods are useful at this level.
- – Definition: Defined process. Preparation of test strategy, plans, test cases.
- – Integration: Testing is carried out throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) – which is nothing but integration with the development activities, E.g., V- Model.
- – Management and Measurement: Review of requirements and designs takes place at this level and criteria has been set for each level of testing
- – Optimization: Many preventive techniques use for testing processes, and tool support(Automation) is used to improve the testing standards and processes.
