Demand Of Quality Professionals Is On High And Will Remain So

Quality is a lot more that identifying and controlling defects. With increasing dependencies on business applications be it on server, mobile or web; is demanding more and more professionals who are capable of this paradigm shift and are intelligent enough to accept the challenge. One of the major areas to be focused in Quality is about understanding of existing processes and efforts towards their enhancements and optimizations.

Business software application is a basic requirement of any business these days. Businesses are emphasizing more on automation, consolidation and integration. Innovation and improvement is always welcomed in this field. With the exponential increase in software industry in the global arena, emphasis on quality needs, its optimization and adherence to processes is becoming more and more important.

The software industry is growing steadily with clear cut demarcation of boundaries. The applications are being built keeping in mind to cater to global market rather than the local area. Because of this fast growth in software industry, there is an increasing demand of quality professionals which will keep increasing in coming years.

Business Needs More Serious Quality Professionals Than Developers

There is a huge shift in mindset regarding scope of quality in software industry. Given the fact that dependency of business is increasing on applications, the adverse impact of any flaw bypassed during quality might impact business heavily. A small transaction leading to a wrong calculation due to a bug could cost a high amount to the business. Quality therefore has a higher amount of significance in today’s scenario.

Development process is supposed to ensure complete adherence to customer requirements and business alignment thereby making it useful for customer else there remains a never ending fight between the customer and delivery organizations regarding the gaps left un-addressed. Even if there is some gaps remain in the final deliverable and those ‘asked for’; it should be closed at the earliest with mutual consent. This can happen only when the development team gives some valid reasons for not filling those gaps due to what so ever constraints and customer agrees to it. Hence due to this higher stake of correctness of coding adhering to customer requirements, it becomes very important for quality to pitch in and ensure a zero defect product.

There has to be a good balance between coding and testing throughout the development cycle. For this, a tester’s knowledge about requirements and product in questions is as critical as it is for development team.

Three Focus Areas To Deliver A Healthy And Delighting Product

Software industry depends highly on quality of product. Bug encountered during and post production but before launch always cost in terms of time and money. Fixing a bug might take a small chunk of time but retesting again is a time consuming job which is required to ensure the impact of bug fixed should not degrade or put a negative impact elsewhere in functionality or business process. Quality again has to play a major role but the onus lies on development team also to ensure a bug free ‘bug fixing’.

Three important acts to perform during product development in a continuous manner can be listed as below:

1. Reviewing Process: Regular reviews, on one hand are quite important; and on the other hand, it is also important to keep reviewing the processes defined for development and testing of a product. The team, process and timelines need to be aligned tightly so as to ensure no leakages during development or after the release of product.

2. Customer Requirements: It is not a one-time exercise to capture customer requirements and then start development in closed doors. This will always lead to failures and disasters in the short and long term, both. It is very important to keep customer engaged during every iteration, internal releases, and milestones completions.

3. Best Practices: How so ever best your practices may be as per your claims, but there is always a scope of improvement, without any doubt.

Quality Is Nothing But QA, QC and Compliance

Typically the vast scope of quality can be divided into three major streams – Quality Control (QC), Quality Assurance (QA) and Compliance. All three streams are critical for any organization engaged in software development activities – be it as a vendor or for internal use. In any case – an internal development team of an organization also more or less is like a vendor which has to ensure smooth delivery and functioning of the products they develop and deploy within their organization.

Scope of Quality Control (QC) is limited to product’s handling, testing, reliability, stability, bug finding, maintaining testing reports and ensuring compliance of documents required for the purpose of audits. QC is responsible for inspection of the product in all aspects from user and business perspective. Code testing and testing of product for the purpose of finding bugs, reporting, maintaining data and its history, getting bugs fixed, retesting, and ensuring finally that the product goes for release with no bugs or leakages. Test cases, test specifications and testing are very important. Retesting of product post fixing of bugs by development team is as critical and needs to be as exhaustive as first time testing of the product.

Scope of Quality Assurance (QA) is to ensure keep evolving best practices, ensure its compliance and adherence with continuous effort to uplift quality standards of the organization and teams by means of training, documentation, audits and change control mechanism. QA is required to be focused more towards compliance and adherence of processes in place. A re-assessment of processes in place is required to be done from time to time. External certification of global standard and regular audits by them always helps in this respect.