QA Testing Process From A-Z

A reputable company that offers QA consulting services will not skimp on extensive testing when a product begins to acquire popularity. Any vulnerabilities and defects can occur in a website or application as more consumers use it, and if this happens, it is likely to result in inadequate product evaluations from customers. At this point, stakeholders must begin assembling a QA team. A senior QA professional and QA team are often hired first.

One of the most vital components of product development is quality assurance. It requires rigorous planning, involvement, and preparation since it is an inescapable project component. You can achieve top-notch products by describing how to build a Quality Assurance process that satisfies the organization’s goals and needs. But are you familiar with the QA testing procedure? To help you understand precisely how a QA team tests your product, we will outline the structure of the quality assurance process in this article.

Let’s first magnify the basics.

What does the QA testing procedure serve?

Some entrepreneurs think developer quality checks are sufficient when creating a small project or an MVP to test a business concept. Such teams thus get caught in never-ending bug patches with a product that is hard to support, maintain, or develop further. A group of qualified quality assurance engineers must do QA testing if you wish to:

• Lower the development price: Early bug detection costs are much less than post-release defects. You may save up to 30% on issue repairs by implementing QA efforts in the early phases of product development.
• Streamline the creation process: QA engineers involved in development from the start may benefit from critical choices, anticipate errors and bugs, and provide practical ways to prevent them.
• Deliver a perfect product: A QA team’s primary objective is to assist you in developing a flawlessly functional product to provide your clients with the finest user experience possible.

Steps Involved In The QA Process

Usually your QA Team will undergo the following steps during the software development life cycle in order to get the desired outcomes.

1. Examine Your Organization’s Needs And Requirements: When opposed to just avoiding bugs at the requirements design stage, fixing bugs found during testing is more expensive. The study and formulation of software requirements, both functional and non-functional, should include QA specialists. Requirements must be consistent, detailed, traceable, and prominently indicated for QAs. This aids the QA team in creating tests especially suited to the programmers under test.

2. Planning of tests: The data gathered during the requirements analysis phase serves as the foundation for the test planning process. The test technique, testing parameters, project budget, and deadlines should all be included in the test plan. Assigning resources and duties to specific testers should also specify the necessary kinds and degrees of testing. It should also have procedures and tools for monitoring defects.

Also Read: Ultimate QA Checklist For Software Development

3. Time to design the test plan: QA teams are now tasked with developing test cases and checklists that cover the software requirements. Conditions, information, and the procedures required to verify each capability must be included in each test case. For testers to know what to compare accurate findings to, each test must also specify the intended test result.

It is advised that QAs begin with a little amount of exploratory testing to get acquainted with the programme. This would facilitate the creation of suitable test scenarios. The stage for developing automation testing QA scenarios occurs if an automation approach has been specified in the test scope.

This step also involves getting the staging environment ready for use. This environment must resemble the production environment regarding the specific hardware, software, and network settings. Databases and system settings, among others, should also be thoroughly modelled.

4. Run tests and file bug reports: Developers do unit tests as the first stage of testing. The QA team then does tests at the API and UI levels. The execution of manual tests follows previously created test cases. All discovered bugs are reported to a defect management programme. Additionally, test automation engineers may run test scripts and provide results using an automated test framework like Selenium, Cypress, or Appium.

5. Conduct regression tests and retests: QAs retest the functions once defects have been identified, reported, and corrected to ensure they didn’t miss any oddities. Regression tests are also performed to ensure that the fixes did not impact the already-in-place functionalities.

6. Run release tests: The QA team must identify the functionality impacted by these changes once developers publish a release notice that includes a list of previously implemented features, resolved bugs, reoccurring problems, and limits. The team must create changed test suites that account for the new build’s features.

To confirm that each build is stable, the QA team must additionally run smoke tests. If the test is successful, changing test suites are performed, and a final report is produced.

How Should You Set Up The QA Process for Agile Environment?

To match the QA process with Agile development concepts, use a few simple techniques:

1. Make QA results-focused: Agile development methodologies focus on smaller objectives and targets that can be completed more quickly in smaller increments. QA procedures must adopt the same strategies as this approach, making them quicker, more dynamic, and laser-focused on specific goals.

2. Make transparency a priority: Any developing strategy benefits from transparency, but Agile success demands it above all. The expectations for the programmer, the features to be tested during each sprint, and the definition of “excellent results” must all be highly apparent to the testers. Because of this clarity, teams can work together, test more quickly, and produce results on time

3. Continue QA as a regular practice: Tests shouldn’t be put off till the conclusion of the development process. As previously stated, tests must be run after each code change. It must take place at every sprint in a manner that allows teams to see problems early on.

4. Introduce DevOps: DevOps streamlines the build, validation, deployment, and software development processes by bringing Agile concepts to QA and Ops teams. Along with many other benefits, it avoids disagreements between the development and QA teams.

• gives developers more control over the production environment
• increases deployment frequency
• reduces the failure rate of newly released software
• increases the average time to recovery
• improves the pace and quality of software deployed and reduces time to market

Also Read: Know The Difference: Automation Testing Vs. DevOps

What tests and methodologies are used in the QA process?

Now let’s discuss all the many test kinds that may be used for software testing. They are many but don’t worry, you will soon be able to move among them.

Functional and non-functional Tests

QA engineers examine if the product performs as expected during functional testing. To put it simply, they check to see whether the output matches the anticipated outcome. While, the QA engineer examines how the product functions under various circumstances during non-functional testing. The surroundings will be altered to observe the results of load, security, stress, and usability tests.

Understanding the source code

QA engineers utilize the “white box” testing style if testers know the source code before testing starts. On the other side, “black box” testing is used if QA engineers do not see the source code they are working with. At this point, testers solely assess the application’s input and output. Whereas “grey box” testing, which combines both of these methods, and is used by testers when they have little knowledge of the internal makeup of the system.

A stage in the creation of software

Depending on where developers are in the software development cycle, tests are then segmented into unit testing, module testing, integration testing, system testing, and user acceptance testing.

Here are a few other exam kinds you could encounter:

• Smoke tests are intended to examine an application’s fundamental functioning. They are simple to carry out, and with their assistance, testers may make sure that the system’s key components are operating properly.
• Regression testing is useful in determining if changes, such as bug patches, have made a programme function as intended.
• To ascertain how an application will behave both during periods of high demand and typical load, load testing is required.
• The programme’s behaviour in various browser/platform environments may be examined with the aid of cross-browser/cross-platform testing.

The testing kinds employed in the QA test process are not limited to those listed above. But understanding the fundamental categories will aid in your comprehension of the subject.

Methods used to execute tests

Manual testing is the term used to describe specific tests carried out by people. Testers carry out test cases and provide test reports when doing manual testing.

Contrarily, some tests are run by computers; this is referred to as automation. Engineers that specialize in test automation are in charge of building and coding test programmers that imitate user experiences and may be used repeatedly to find problems in the product under test. Although each of these types of testing has advantages and disadvantages, they provide effective outcomes when combined.

Also Read: Low Code Automated Software Testing [Guide]

Here are some manual testing considerations. Smaller test projects are better suited for manual testing because manual tests often catch problems that an automated test would have overlooked. And lastly, manual testing is rather simple to understand and doesn’t need much scripting language expertise.

On the other hand, manual testing takes a lot of time if testers are working on a large project, and human error can never be completely ruled out. Similar to how automation offers several advantages, it may be used again. It also works well for big tasks. On the other hand, it lacks the human touch and is prone to overlooking faults beyond its code’s purview.

Delivering the finest product to clients is always the ultimate aim, regardless of the business’s strategy or technique. Effective software testing service company like KiwiQA can help you to save expenses, raise the general level of software quality, and enhance user satisfaction.