Key Takeaways:
- QA helps solve product issues reactively
- Opportunities to cut costs, boost collaboration and satisfy customers
- Future innovations make QA a must in the long-term
- Working with an expert partner can support QA best practice
Quality Assurance in Product Development: An Essential Aspect or an Extra Perk?
Quality Assurance (QA) is a vital part of creating any successful product, whether physical or digital. It ensures that developed concepts are thoroughly tested and have their weaknesses addressed before they go to market, so that customers get products that are effective, reliable and safe.
When it comes to software development, views on QA are mixed: some consider it essential, while others consider it an optional ‘nice to have’. This blog explores the areas where quality assurance in product development can make the biggest difference.
Curious about QA in finance? Read our latest blog on how to improve quality assurance in banking & financial applications.
Understanding Quality Assurance in Product Development
In the context of product development, quality assurance sets out to ensure that products meet the expectations of customers (or ideally exceed them), are compliant with all relevant regulations, and meet the highest possible standards of quality and reliability in their creation.
This differs from Quality Control (QC) in that QC looks for defects and problems in products that have already been created; for example, detecting and resolving bugs in software that’s ready for use but hasn’t been launched. QA, on the other hand, is embedded into the development process from the outset, so that in theory, those problems don’t get as far as QC in the first place.
In short, QA is proactive and QC is reactive - but the two can complement each other in a comprehensive approach to product development.
The Key Benefits of Quality Assurance
Preventing Quality Failures
Using QA to mitigate potential quality issues proactively can ensure that harmful and disruptive problems never make it as far as customers, where the impact can be extremely severe.
The recent problems affecting the cyber security firm Crowdstrike are a good example of what can happen. Crowdstrike sent out a software update that was corrupted to a large number of customers, including a range of multinationals, resulting in Windows failing for millions of users around the world. The outage is estimated to have generated $5.4 billion in losses, solely among the US Fortune 500 companies impacted.
This example highlights how important comprehensive QA can be in identifying bugs before software is released.
Protecting and Improving Brand Reputation
Connected to the previous point, the damage of poor QA can be internal for the software company involved, as well as external for customers.
Customers don’t always go out of their way to flag up things that go right, but they’re more than prepared to highlight things that go wrong. When product quality misses a problem, customers will not only look for an alternative solution from a competitor, but they will share their negative experience with co-workers and contacts - including through social media.
So while excellent QA might not attract much praise, it’s an important part of maintaining a good brand reputation, along with customer loyalty and trust, and by extension profitability and revenue in the long-term.
Meeting Customer Requirements
According to Forbes, 85% of new products released into the US market fail - and a lack of testing before product release is a common cause of that failure.
At a time when customer demands have never been higher, quality assurance has an important part to play in ensuring that products at the very least meet the expectations and requirements of those buying them.
Those expectations can range across reliability, efficiency, accuracy, longevity, safety, security and a whole load of other factors, depending on the product concerned - but the most important part is that QA addresses every weakness before customers get the chance to experience them themselves.
Enhancing Team Collaboration
QA processes naturally bring together all the stakeholders involved in making a product a success, from the developers who created it, to the testers who will assess it, to the business teams who will sell and market it.
It therefore acts as a natural platform for collaboration, as more people can spot issues earlier in the production process, such as during the planning and design phases. This can help make the rectification and mitigation of any problems easier, quicker and cheaper than it would be to do so reactively.
Want to see how digital assurance and digital transformation go hand in hand?
Cost Management
Developing any product can be an expensive endeavor, which means it’s vital not only to iron out problems through QA, but also to reduce unnecessary cost along the way.
When issues are resolved by the QA process, the risk of expensive recalls or updates is minimized, as is the potential expense of reworking software at the last minute to meet release deadlines. This can help keep software development both on time and on budget, and therefore maximize its success and profitability.
In Summary: Why Future Trends Make QA in Product Design Essential
If you still feel that the above benefits of QA are advantageous but not a must-have, the changes and innovations coming down the track will undoubtedly turn QA into a software development essential.
Technologies like big data, AI, the cloud and automation have ever-increasing roles to play in supporting top-quality QA in the long-term. This ranges from QA automation software that executes tests on software to iron out bugs early on, to the use of AI in predicting and mitigating quality issues before they can have any impact.
These will work in tandem with rising internal QA trends such as shift-left testing that moves QA activities much earlier in the development process, and exploratory testing that takes an open-ended, more inquisitive approach to issue detection.
The best way to take full advantage of all the potential of quality assurance in product development is to partner with an expert, one that can deliver proven best practice and innovative approaches along the way. Take a look at Ciklum’s approach to digital assurance here, then contact the team to find out more.
