Creating Business Value through matured QA and testing practices:

Today, IT industries are growing at a very fast pace so competition is increasing day by day. Stakeholders demand high quality products in lesser price and time. So, QA needs to focus not only to improve the quality of product but also on business values and delivery time to survive in industry.

QA Testing needs to track 'Business Metrics' and test the product with business focus that would help in increasing the quality of product and detecting the critical business process defects.

Test the product from the end user's point of view that would make the product user friendly and increase the demand of product.

It is always helpful for QA to understand its client's business process and their product's requirements completely in enhancing the quality of product at reduced cost and lesser time. 'Business Driven QA' approach is very successful that's why, 'Testing' phase is added into 'Software Life cycle' and outcome of these software are depended on success of 'Testing' phase.

Following are few of the examples to create Business Value with mature QA and testing practices that can benefit the client as well as their end users :-

1. Test with a Business Focus: A logical understanding by the QA Testing teams of the business procedure that the application would hold, enables them to simply notice serious business process bugs.

2. Test from an end-user’s perspective: Digging an application by following the end – user scenarios in mind helps the QA team bring an improved skill post to the final output.

3. Map Business Impact:  In a case, where test plan are based on the criticality of business requirements and analysis, optimal QA coverage is aimed with negligible risk.

4. Measure Business Metrics: Now-a-days, it is enormously significant to trail business program metrics as an alternative of just testing program metrics as its helps us enumerate and be in touch with the business value resulting from a QA program enabling QA to give good reason for its reliability.

5. Collaborative Testing: With the rising acceptance of Agile and progressive towards realizing DevOps vision, the testing team needs to move center from bug discovery to early and nonstop feedback and contributions to improving quality.

6. Continuous Test Automation: Testing near the beginning and endlessly also necessitates using a broad range of tools (commercial, in-house and open source) and scripting languages.

7. Visual Modeling: Need for synched and that too everyday collaboration with program team also comes the need to use visual modeling tools.

8. Mission Risk Mitigation: This mission is addressing the variety of risk and covering those risks based on thorough analysis of metrics.

A Business driven test program capture business metrics which ensure businesses to measure the success of test programs against business goals. To achieve this, test team gets involved in the very initial phases of project life cycle to understand the exact business process.

Whereas test program metrics of a traditional project covers normal testing life cycle like quality, productivity etc. It does not cover any detail regarding business impact of QA. Here, QA team comes into later phases of project usually during design or testing phase.

Here are some methods that can help in creating business value with QA practices:

1. Need to understand the exact business requirements/QA process which would be supported by the application being tested.

2. Need to test the application with an end user perspective which would help to deliver better quality product.

3. The tests in the test plan should be based on the criticality of the business requirements.

4. Need to create business program metrics along with testing program metrics. That would help us to quantify the business value derived from QA program.

To deliver a better quality work to the client is as much important as delivering best quality product to the end user. To provide an effective quality of testing and QA implementation, the company needs to have QA processes in place which also helps in keeping transparency in work status and reports in a sophisticated manner. QA manager should commit the upcoming challenges and should deliver the daily/final reports at the right time so as to maintain the client's trust.

As a QA team, all the deliverables should be as per the client's recommendations such as the Test strategies, Testing Tools that client favors for, ROI reports of automation, having bandwidth to provide extra efforts at the time of signing of the iteration or any other project risks.

Summary:

Today, IT industries are growing at a very fast pace so competition is increasing day by day. Stakeholders demand high quality products in lesser price and time. So, QA needs to focus not only to improve the quality of product but also on business values and delivery time to survive in industry.To provide an effective quality of testing and QA implementation, the company needs to have QA processes in place which also helps in keeping transparency in work status and reports in a sophisticated manner.

Keywords:  QA Testing, QA Process

Author:

Knowledge Sharing Team at QA InfoTech is responsible for research on new tools & technologies for effective software testing services across all industry verticals. QA InfoTech (an ISO 9001:2008 & CMMI III certified) is one of the leading Quality assurance Testing Companies with five testing “Centers of Excellence” in the United States and India.  It offers end to endqa testing services.

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