Have you heard about Quality Assurance?
Many companies have been recurring to QA services lately and one of the reasons why this is happening is that users demand for better products is increasing now more than ever. By introducing Quality Assurance to your project, you can obtain several benefits:
- Keep your product stable and ensure it goes the right direction.
- Increase clients happiness and satisfaction.
- Make a positive impact on sales.
For a start, you have to fully understand your client's needs before anything else; you cannot expect to build a successful product without the team (PO, design, developers, QA) having clear expectations of it. Once this is settled, the design, development and QA areas have to sit down and start writing a detailed list of clear & specific requirements for your product. Let me explain a bit more how QA can begin contributing from here.
This planning phase is critical when building your product because this is the time when QA comes into play, brainstorming and putting on the table a bunch of unexpected scenarios based on the list of clear requirements your team prepared earlier. Then, QA starts turning these into the happy, alternate, and edge cases (hint: this will help you automate your tests later) that will assist when performing the tests. It's best that these unforeseen situations arise in this phase than in the future when errors cost way more to be fixed.
After the planning phase, the fun part arrives for QA and developers. QA is not just about finding flaws within a product and documenting these bugs so they get fixed in the current or upcoming sprints, it's also about guaranteeing that you're building a great product following the best practices and making sure it's working as expected, preparing releases and raising a flag when the process is not being followed correctly.
It's essential to know that the entire team is responsible for the quality of the product, not just the QA members. It's also worth to mention that if the whole process of building a product is done and followed correctly, QA can save you a lot of money and time. Finally, always keep in mind that each project is different so clients' needs may vary but the key is to be able to adapt and tackle these challenges.