How can QA engineering prevent software defects?

To prevent software defects, product teams must continuously collaborate to define clear, complete, testable and regularly updated requirements aligned to evolving business goals and user needs. QA engineers play a vital role working across functions to verify and validate these requirements so development efforts meet specifications. Requirements refinement is a collective responsibility requiring review cycles and cross-functional committees to identify gaps or issues. Unclear requirements are a root cause of defects that quality-focused organizations seek to prevent through shared ownership.

I disagree with some of this statement. As a QA, we are usually part of the DEV/delivery teams, and we don't always know what the business wants for a certain feature request no matter how finely groomed or refined a story is. We do our best to try to anticipate what the business wants, but I don't believe its the role of QA to be responsible for poor acceptance criteria

It's a bit troublesome to have an insight into how the user flow will be of a particular feature when discussing it during a pre-grooming or grooming sessions. While the QA team usually can imagine what flow the user might go through, many more questions arise after a product is ready to be tested. With that said, I think that the company and the product team should have a template of minimum points that need to be included in the requirements for the sake of consistency. And any questions that arise during the testing should be tackled accordingly.

Simply defining clear requirements is not enough. They must also be deployed correctly such they are understood in the correct way. Consider the Mars Climate Orbiter, a satellite launched to Mars that crashed or evaporated due to low altitude in orbiting Mars. This error was due to the use of different metric systems by the ground station software and the onboard software. However, the Software Interface Specification clearly specified that the SI metric system should be used. Even though they had clear requirements, a mistake was made.

I kind of disagree on reviewing and updating the requirements .This is an ownerrship of product. Preventing defect leakage is a collective teams effort . Introducing Shift left approach , bringing QA team to be part of requirement feasibility discussion, technical feasibility,involving in dev code reviews helps them in understanding the feature/product more.

I disagree with some of this. Typically, QA is not responsible for unit tests. Unit tests are beneficial for the developers to ensure that they are writing the code they think they are (does this function return an object like its supposed to type tests)

Okay, let's step back and think about "all critical aspects of the software product" sentence. As a QA, our job depends on software requirements specification and other straints are time and budget. This is why we spend our test design and plans based on requirements. That's being said, "All aspect" maybe the point that impossible to reach depending on straints. That perspective can be enhanced with "according to specifications" definition.

I agree with James. Unit tests are functional white box testing. The engineers should have the best handle on white box because they wrote the blasted thing.

In the article it is stated that QA engineers should 'use test data that are valid, diverse, and representative'. How about data that is not representative, data that is corrupt? These to cover the 'sad flows' and test robustness and resilience of the software. The same applies, of course, to the test cases themselves, also here 'sad flows' and error situations need to be considered and tested.

Concerning the unit tests, I agree with James that the developer is typically responsible for the unit tests. QA however can have a powerful role in mentoring them towards sharper tests using risk based methods.

Nowadays Playwright have been showing huge improvement and seems the future when we talk about automate tests, this framework bring several benefits like storage token sessions, setup workers and fast execution, with that allows easy way to identify potential issues and we can create tests without any abstraction or complex using the KISS principle.

The most impactful testing automation focuses on upstream activities, yet is often overlooked. Automate the design of test cases by modelling expected system behaviours, then auto-generate test cases from those models. Automated model validation forces clearer thinking on required behaviour early. Coded examples facilitate discussions and align understanding. Automating these collaborative design processes improves system quality and testability far more than simply scripting UI test steps. While some test execution can be automated, also value manual testing assessing subtler qualities. Target automation on amplifying communication, shared understanding and preventing defects - not just accelerating scripted regression checks.

Agreed on the need for automation. But Cypress is the way forwards in my opinion. Yes, there are some tools better at certain things, but Cypress can be built upon and plug-ins can be created since you have full access to Node

Automation of tests is beneficial for tests which need to be executed repeatedly and tests need to be executed repeatedly to detect regressions as soon as possible.

Maybe nice to add that requirements are becoming smarter, and also tools to check the requirements are becoming stronger. So in addition to the various tools to automate tests for code, also consider using tools to test the requirements.

Interesting to see that SonarQube is mentioned in the context of code reviews. SonarQube performs static code analysis, which is, in my opinion, an activity on its own next to code reviews and testing.

I believe that the building of a solid system requires that all the development team has to be commited with quality, not only the QA team. That said, is very important to analyse and understand if the quality metrics that are been used as standards in a project or system, are the most useful considering the requirements, resources and time available. This analysis surely can improve the quality of your product.

For monitoring and improving quality a baseline or reference is wanted. What level of quality do you want to achieve and why? As an example, if you are developing a fun-app, you quality level might be different then when you are developing safety-critical systems.

QA engineering involves constantly measuring software quality, communicating with stakeholders, and refining processes. Using metrics and embracing new technologies are key to maintaining high standards.

Bugs cannot be prevented 100% of the time. With that said, the QA team is there to ensure that even if there are bugs within the product, they are so small that the user will not even notice them. As a QA, you need to be well aware of the key areas of the product that is impacted by this or that change; you need to understand the connection of this area of the product to the rest of it; stabilization and regression testing should be a standard before releases; test cases and approaches should be constantly updated to reflect all the changes in the product; and the entire QA cycle should be alive 24/7.