Why Good Quality Assurance Matters to a Business

The software development world is extremely competitive, with more and more companies creating products at a very rapid pace.

Under such circumstances, it becomes harder and harder for businesses to maintain quality and meet customers’ high demands.

But that is exactly the reason why good software quality assurance is so important and requires special attention.

What does QA stand for in business

According to Statista, on average around 26% of the organization’s annual IT budget was geared to quality assurance and testing.

It seems like modern businesses understand the importance of QA and are ready to invest money in it. But what is Quality Assurance and what exact benefits can it bring?

Generally speaking, quality assurance is a set of elaborate activities that define the ability of software to meet requirements, such as reliability, efficiency, and stability.

QA is aimed to ensure that the software product will be error-free and will meet the expectations of the most demanding users.

Basically, quality assurance covers a whole range of procedures that include planning, monitoring, evaluation, and testing.

One of the main tasks of the QA process is to find and analyze any inconsistencies as soon as possible, to improve the process and thus to reduce these types of bugs.

It is worth noting that QA begins before a single line of code is written and continues through the development process, release of the software and beyond, with maintenance and management after release included. This approach allows us to continually сatch and fix any issues that might occur within a product.

The introduction of testing is particularly important in the early stages of project development as it allows to reduce the costs of eliminating detected errors significantly.

If testing is included in the general development process only as one of the separate stages of the general process, separated from the general cycle, the project’s risks increase.

The benefits of software QA process are enormous and include the following:

• Cost reduction. If QA was introduced at an early stage of development it allows to reduce the cost of error correction significantly.

• Competitiveness improvement. Software testing throughout the entire development cycle is one of the key factors to ensure the quality and thus the competitiveness of the final product.
• Compatibility assurance. Despite the fact that the development environment differs from that in which the final product is used, QA allows testing the software in conditions that are similar to the real world.

• UX Enhancement. The evaluation of the usability by QA experts will help you find ways to provide the best user experience to your customers.

• Process control. QA allows controlling the development process and preventing the scenario where the final product is very different from the planned one.

• Security risk mitigation. The bugs of the software can present security risks that can wreak havoc on your project. By introducing the best QA practices you eliminate this threat once and for all.

• Ideas generation. By examining all the pitfalls of the product carefully, QA specialists can come up with an unexpected but useful idea that will improve your project.

• Smooth delivery. Proper QA helps reveal and fix all the critical issues before the launch, so you won’t miss the deadline or lose the competitive advantage.

• Brand strengthening. Building a good reputation takes a lot of work but it is very easy to lose the trust of the customers because of the low-quality product. The QA system serves as a guarantee that it’ll never happen to your company.

Quality – your key to success

No matter which sector your company belongs to, or what is the size of your business, quality matters a lot.

Various studies from different industries show that there is a strong correlation between the quality of the products and the profitability of the company.

It is also needless to say that high-quality products and happy clients are good markers that will allow you to stand out from competitors as well as attract investors’ attention.

If you are a well-established brand, quality is probably one of the main pillars on which your success was built.

When you have a successful business, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take care about quality anymore, vise versa, you need good quality assurance to cement your status and keep in pace with your clients’ desires and needs.

At the same time, compromising on this issue is not an option even if you are still at the beginning of your business journey.

For startups, which often offer their customers unique and extraordinary solutions, a decent quality is the only way to be sure that they have brought the correct product to the market.

Constant testing and quality assurance for young companies also serves as a guarantee that they won’t fail at an early stage and will manage to break through a competitive field.

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