Importance of robust QA practices
As I write this article straight out of my heart, I am encapsulating the thoughts which I have experienced /encountered during nine years of my career.
I have seen that most of the organizations still want to cut down costs on QA or want to minimize costs for QA /QC. Regardless of the fact that you are working in a fixed bid /T & M model, robust QA practices are indispensable because of the following reasons:
- A defect not found in the earliest stage of the project which if found during UAT/after code moves into production can be a nightmare.
- A developer's mindset is a different mindset while doing the unit testing and a tester brings in the fresh perspective during smoke/sanity/functional /regression testing.
- Importance of manual testing cannot be overruled even after so many automation tools like QTP,Selenium and many of the freewares avaialbale in market as first round of testing used to be/is/will always be manual.
- Quality is the key-We can correlate it to our daily chores too.No only in software, if anything is accomplished with quality in any other walk of life it gives umpteen satisfaction.
- We cannot ignore anything out of software test life cycle, System/functional/integration/smoke/sanity/regression/UAT -every piece of cake has its relevant significance.
- To cut down the costs in agile environment I have seen developers doing system testing themselves instead of separate QA folks-its like putting the axe on one's leg.
- QA signoffs are avoided in many projects -again a pitfall that we should always avoid. till the QA signs off the code with or without the known defects we should always resist on deploying the code in production but again this is rarely followed stringently.
- Over the time period I have seen that in some of the projects we have a dual role called QA/BA. This is a win -win situation for customer & vendor both as this integrated role saves some cost and at the same time brings the same insight of QA.
There are many more thoughts to ponder upon or put forward across the table. But definitely robust QA practices can add feathers to the cap of any organization/project .....
Disclaimer :Please note that above thoughts expressed are purely my personal opinion.Please feel free to advise upon /share your views...