3 QA practices to enhance the quality of your software delivery process

Covid-19 has changed how we work by pushing companies to become more flexible with employee work environments and expectations. These changes have driven organizations to develop software that addresses the needs of a post-pandemic world at a rapid pace.

While forward-thinking leaders know the value of being first to market, skimping on QA can negatively impact your brand. Just consider the nest thermostat glitch that left thousands without heat or the payments glitch at HSBC that left almost 300,000 without pay. These examples illustrate how failing to catch serious bugs can hurt your brand and lead to financial ramifications.

Is there a way to speed up development while maintaining high product standards? We’ll take a look at three QA practices that help teams speed up projects without sacrificing quality.

Shift-left testing can uncover improvement opportunities

Businesses that develop software solutions want to provide applications that are as bug-free as possible. This goal requires teams to start the conversation around testing much earlier since bugs caught early can be fixed faster and at a fraction of the cost.

However, shifting left isn’t only about testing your code earlier in the development cycle. It’s also about leveraging critical data collected throughout the development cycle to shed light on improvement opportunities that will increase quality and speed. To enable shift-left continuous improvement, project teams must determine which KPIs will provide the data that provides improvement insights. A good starting point is assessing your development cycles’ quality with questions like these:

• Where in the development process are most of your defects injected?
• How testable and stable are your requirements/user stories?
• What is your defect leakage across unit tests, system tests, UAT, and into production?

Infuse agile development with QA thinking

Pre-existing market pressures and Covid-19 have emphasized the need for faster delivery and highly effective agile teams. However, successful agile implementation requires strong sprint planning. This planning starts with picking the right number of stories per sprint for your team. Considering the user story complexity, number of developers, and duration of the sprint (typically two weeks) will help you determine the development velocity and pick attainable goals.

Additionally, including the QA team in the sprint planning process helps your team understand dependencies, downstream impacts, and anticipate challenges. This knowledge is essential because the ability to create new elements quickly does not mean they will be easy to test. For example, integrations, security settings, and sensitive data are just a few factors that can make testing difficult.

• You can get your team into the quality mindset by asking questions like these:
• What is the right number of user stories for my team after considering the complexity of testing?
• How can continuous testing be instilled as everyone’s responsibility for quality?
• How is the team improving the processes that prevent defects instead of merely finding them?

Comprehensive test automation is key to product integrity

Today, most organizations find themselves contending with rapid release cycles. In this environment, the importance of having an automated regression test suite has become critical to ensuring a successful user experience — one that is defect-free and does not negatively impact your brand.

Well-executed automation can help you guarantee and maintain the quality of your products. To that end, the following questions can help you ensure your test automation covers the most critical elements, addresses potential gaps, and contributes to creating a better user experience from day one:

• Do you know your end-user behavior, and does it align with your regression test coverage strategy?
• How frequently are you running your automated regression test suite? If not with each code build, why not?
• How often do you perform root cause analysis on your production defects and use this data to assess your automated regression test suite?

Don’t sacrifice development velocity or quality

Accelerated development velocity doesn’t have to equal lower quality standards. As we’ve considered in this article, imbuing your software delivery process with QA at every stage will improve quality and help you anticipate challenges before they become costly. By asking the right questions about shift-left testing, agile development, and test automation, you can achieve higher velocities and higher quality standards than ever before.