The Basics of Software Testing and QA Services

The project development process consists of multiple stages and involves a lot of different professionals. In the simplest understanding of it, a software project starts with project discovery, where the business idea is refined. After that, it goes through UI/UX design, where the idea is visually implemented. Then, the development and testing process begins — probably the longest phase in the software development life cycle. Afterward, the project is deployed, maintained, and supported.

As you could see, development and testing go hand-in-hand. But what exactly is testing and what is the purpose of it? These questions and many others are what we will focus on in this article.

Let's start with the basics. How does one define software testing?

Software testing, also referred to as Quality Assurance, is one of the essential project development processes aimed to assure that the project is technically impeccable, secure, and compliant with business requirements.

According to Economic Times, "The process or method of finding error/s in a software application or program so that the application functions according to the end user's requirement is called software testing." Meanwhile, according to Software Testing Material "Software testing is a process, to evaluate the functionality of a software application with an intent to find whether the developed software met the specified requirements or not and to identify the defects to ensure that the product is defect-free in order to produce the quality product."

Overall,Software testing and QA services are used to make sure that the developed product meets users' expectations, which is the very goal of project development.

The process of Quality Assurance involves:

• Software testers are the primary people engaged in the software testing process. They formulate the Quality Assurance strategy, test the system from end to end, manually or automatedly, and manage QA documentation.
• Software engineers are the people who actually write the software code, but they are also the one to cover this code with unit tests and API tests. Also, they fix the bugs reported by software testers.
• UI/UX designers are engaged in software design, but UX testing is also one of their responsibilities. They have to make sure that the system is user-friendly and intuitive, and if any UX issues occur, they report them to the development team.
• Project Manager organizes the entire project development process. Depending on the project management model and team composition, their duties vary. But in most general cases, they serve as a middle person between the client, developers, QAs, designers, and other team members. In particular, they make sure that all the developed tasks are tested and all the reported errors are fixed.
• The client team might want to make sure that the software functions as expected, so they may also test it manually sometimes. They also engage in acceptance testing.

Depending on the project management model, the process of QA may vary, but of course, there is the most general scenario.

First, the entire team meets for a planning session, where they analyze project requirements and project scope. Once they plan the scope for a certain time span, they look at the project requirements closer, and the developers start writing code. Once they are finished, they cover this code with unit tests to make sure that everything works well. Once the code is deployed, the QA specialists start testing it. If everything works well, without bugs, and according to requirements, this functionality is deployed and presented to the client. If any bugs occur, QA professionals report them to the team, so that developers could keep working on this functionality. This cycle continues until there are no bugs in the system.

In fact, you should understand that the absence of bugs is quite a dystopian goal, but your job is to make sure that there are as few bugs as possible and that no medium-priority or high-priority bugs slip through.

The main QA documents are:

• Test Plan is a document, which describes the Quality Assurance strategy: what feature should be tested, when, by whom, what are the acceptance requirements, and what resources are needed.
• Test Progress Report is a document similar to test plan, which adds details on the status of a certain task (open, in progress, or completed), when it was completed, and what are the comments. Usually, Test Plan and Test Progress Report are combined into one.
• Test Cases are the detailed descriptions of each feature that needs to be tested. They include the general description of the feature to be tested, testing steps, expected results, status, and actual results.
• Defect Reports are the reports that are used to notify the team about any errors or bugs found. Here, each bug is assigned a unique ID, summarized, and described in details. A defect report also includes steps to reproduce, information on reproducibility, severity, priority, and environment. It also may feature some attachments, such as video files, images, or audio files.

QA software testing services are crucially important as they help you make sure that the developed product is secure, stable, performant, and user-friendly. The modern-day software market is overcrowded — therefore, users give no second chances to the apps that failed them once. Make sure that your app does not fail your users, and your users will be devoted to your product or service.