The Importance of Testing and Quality Assurance in Software Development

Building products is one thing and building quality products is another. Most users care more about the quality of your product than its potential utility. After all, your product offerings wouldn't matter as much when users cannot enjoy using the product.?

According to a 2020 survey, over 34% of users will delete an app immediately after encountering a software bug. Evidently, the pressure to ensure software quality has increased, especially in highly competitive markets. Thus, quality assurance and testing should be a top priority for businesses that take user experience seriously.?

What is Quality Assurance and Testing in Software Development?

Quality assurance involves ensuring that a software’s quality aligns with the client’s requirements. It entails implementing technical standards, collecting and analyzing errors, utilizing quality software engineering tools, and adopting a comprehensive multi-testing strategy.

On the other hand, testing entails conducting trials on software to determine defects, errors, or bugs. These trials are usually carried out through intensive testing processes to identify bugs and ensure that they are fixed before the software is launched for use. Thus, quality assurance is often more comprehensive than testing.?

Why You Should Implement Quality Assurance and Testing

The benefits of quality assurance and testing are numerous. Some of them include:

Maintenance of Customer Loyalty

When your software’s quality is guaranteed, your customer retention rate significantly increases. According to the App Attention Span Study, 86 percent of users deleted their mobile apps due to poor performance. Another 26 percent reported that they would spend more on an organization with an excellent mobile app. Essentially, users are willing to pay for quality, and they are equally willing to let go of an app due to quality issues. With a robust quality assurance mechanism, there are high tendencies that your user base will increase.?

It Saves Costs

Picture this: You buy a used Nissan 2008 Altima without confirming its quality. You subsequently discover that the carburettor is bad, the engine is faulty, and the brakes are grinding. Needless to say, you would spend a ton of money repairing the faults. The costs could even render the car purchase a worthless venture. The same thing applies to software. Your company could incur enormous costs due to the failure to confirm the software's quality before releasing it for usage. According to the CISQ’s 2020 report, US companies incurred a $520 billion cost due to poor quality in software legacy systems.?

It Guarantees Product Safety

While the safety concerns related to software are not physical, the safety risks can be grave. A primary example is the risk that faulty software could compromise users' data. This risk could snowball into a severe problem as regulators are increasingly seeking to enforce data privacy laws. Hefty fines have been slammed on numerous companies due to these data breaches.?

Conclusion

To ensure the quality of your software, you must prioritize quality assurance within your in-house team. If you decide to outsource to a software house, you should pick a provider that implements quality assurance processes. A software provider like YouDigital - Salesforce & ServiceNow implements multi-level testing strategies to detect errors in the production stage.?