How important is quality assurance to the software development life cycle?
In a word: Very.
Some of you may not even be sure what that means, quality assurance (QA), so I’ll tell you. Quality assurance is more than software testing. Quality assurance is about monitoring each step of the software development process to ensure that high-level quality standards — that were decided and agreed upon before development began — are met, and that the final product is the best that it can be.
Some of you may think you don’t need dedicated QA teams, but I’ll tell you. You do.
Objections to Quality Assurance for Software Development
Those who think they don’t need to build quality assurance into their structure and development processes will argue against merit and cost. They don’t think it will result in any improvement. They think it will be too expensive. I hear this all the time. And sure, their arguments are valid… but only to a point.
Their arguments are valid until a client or an end-user comes in to test the software, and something unexpected happens. Uh oh. It’s then that the objector suddenly changes his tune. A quality assurance team would have considered the possibility of the unexpected; an investment in quality assurance might have saved the software developer a little time, and prevented a lot of client disappointment.
Quality assurance will improve customer satisfaction.
There is no piece of software, no application, no product that is 100 percent perfect the first time — nor any time after — and your customer or client may always find some kind of issue, but if QA has been monitored effectively, the problems will be easily fixed, and the resulting cost will be minimal. When you choose to incorporate quality assurance into your development processes, customer expectations will be better met, the first time.
Quality assurance reduces the cost of maintenance.
Put simply, it will cost so much less to rework code, and fix bugs before the product has been delivered than after. Can you imagine? Problems found in the early stages of development can be fixed right away; it’s not so simple once hundreds, or thousands have people have downloaded the software.
You develop the software. Innolance will take care of the quality assurance.
Innolance has an independent, specialized QA testing department with experienced professionals, proven processes, and tool specialists. We pride ourselves on offering comprehensive high-level support to development teams, and will adopt onsite, offsite, and hybrid (onsite and offsite) workflow processes to meet each client’s specific needs.