Every business aims to develop cost-effective products without compromising quality. In the software development industry, project expenditure is one of the biggest concerns. However, a bug or issue reported after the software product release or launch can be four to five times more expensive than in the duration of SDLC. Organizations usually have the perfect time to save their costs and get rid of extra hours before the product goes live via conducting a specific process known as software testing usually know as QA. The software development teams must strategically integrate testing & QA throughout the Software development life-cycle to deliver a cost-effective product.
What strategy must be incorporated to integrate QA?
Now your brains have popped up with questions: How do I save cost without not trading off quality? Or What testing strategy/technique should I integrate to make the SDLC more budget-friendly and quality-driven? Well, the strategy you need to carry out to get rid of these problems like extra hours and extra costs then go for “Prevention-first strategy.” Now prevention-first technique means the earlier a bug or error is recognized, the earlier it gets resolved, and more time, resources, and energy would get saved.
For implementing this technique, organizations select and use various software testing tools available in the market. These tools allow the testing teams and the business owners to get rid of the heavy finances and energy involved via manually inspecting or hunting for bugs and errors.
Now let’s get you a ride of significant considerations to incorporate this strategy;
- Must perform an in-depth analysis of software requirements, do proper documentation, and rigorous discussions to stay on the same page. According to a recent survey, almost 45 percent of bugs and errors are more likely to be present in the software requirements and design than in the source code during the SDLC processes. Therefore, it is crucial to conduct or perform an in-depth analysis of software requirements and design before instigating the development process. The prior paperwork or using dynamic software testing tools before the execution helps in digging out the ghastly defects or errors involved in it. You likely end up incurring a lot more costs to fix the errors in the whole life-cycle if you skip the pre-SDLC assessment of software requirements and goals.
- An eye behind an eye – It is always a great idea to check, evaluate, or review the codes written by developers because an eye behind an eye saves a hunch. The best technique to follow for reviewing code is to employ this principle in the coding stage and ask every member of the development team to review the code for hunting and inspecting potential errors involved. A recent survey concluded that the cost of fixing a bug or error in the production stage is 15 hours compared to five hours if the same bug were found in the coding stage.
- Target and prevent systematic defects – Ask or direct your development and quality assurance teams to target system defects or errors because, typically, systemic errors are accountable for the majority of issues discovered in the process. In product management, such types of errors may harm the final product. Identifying the root cause and resolving system errors earlier in the production process can save a lot of cost and time while protecting or preventing a software product from future discrepancies like low retention rates, lack of gaining user attention, etc.
- Crowd testing – Through quality inspection testing, you can access more than 35,000 testers worldwide for error finding and structured quality inspection testing. Every mobile and web-based application should be thoroughly tested even with the most stringent active quality inspection strategy to ensure they are error-free.
- Use of tools to cut extra hours and cost – One of the best ways to incorporate quality assurance into your software development life-cycle is to implement the use of special time and cost-saving tools like software testing tools or defect tracking software for hunting maximum errors or bugs, test management tools to manage, track and record tests, etc. These tools allow teams to incorporate their efforts and energy into more valuable tasks while providing ease of testing a particular software or application.
Final Words
Since quality assurance is a department that makes up a foundation of an organization more strong, it is the responsibility of managerial staff to ensure that whether the QA is a source of providing them with cost reduction, time-saving, and quality products or not. If not then the QA strategy needs to be revised.
