When it comes to meeting customer expectations and ensuring flawless experience, Software Quality Management (SQM) is essential since it encompasses tasks such as quality assurance, testing, and ongoing enhancement. Through the implementation of quality management, you can deliver software that is dependable, effective, and user-friendly.
Quality management in software is generally summarised as:
Thus, to ensure the products are defect-free and fulfil all the quality attributes, testing activities should be done in parallel with the development. Below, the KSM Solutions’ QA Experts have shared the best practices for a well-functioning, comprehensive SQM process.
How does Software Quality Management work?
Best Practices for Software Quality Management
1. Consider Testing Pyramid in Planning Testing Strategy
2. Automate Regression Testing
3. Apply Cloud Test Environments
4. Emulate the Developer Environments
5. Follow Agile Testing Process
How KMS Solutions Can Help with Software Quality Management?
Before jumping into the tips to optimise the SQM, you should understand its functionality. Generally, SQM activities can be divided into three main components: Quality Assurance, Quality Planning, and Quality Control.
In this step, you can establish a well-structured and coherent set of organisational procedures that determine software development standards coupled with regulatory procedures, helping increase the likelihood of generating software of superior quality.
This phase may consist of:
This phase concentrates either on business-wide quality management practices or on particular projects. A quality plan at the project level should include:
The quality control team tests and reviews if the product is compliant with quality assurance standards and processes at both the organisational and project level. This component includes both manual and automation testing.
Software QC is more product-oriented and can be started simultaneously with the development process. Corporations should implement Agile quality management since it accelerates the testing process and ensures that defects are identified and resolved early, reducing the cost of rework and improving customer satisfaction.
Source: Semaphore
The testing pyramid is a popular testing approach that represents the relative number of tests that should be created at different levels of the application's architecture. It consists of three layers: unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests. This approach helps to identify defects early in the development cycle, making them easier and less expensive to fix. Additionally, a well-designed testing pyramid can help ensure that software is reliable, stable, and performs well.
Regardless of their criticality, whenever code changes, they will need to be regression-tested. Conducting a regression cycle at the last stage of stabilisation is essential to ensure that previously working features have not been affected when there are development changes.
Teams often encounter time restrictions since the bulk of a team's effort is devoted to testing existing features. Whereas sections that need the greatest human work, such as exploratory testing to identify edge cases, are usually rushed through.
As regression testing involves re-running previously executed test cases, this type of testing is the best candidate for automation testing. Automated test flows allow teams to efficiently identify and select necessary test cases without the need to create new test cases every time. By scheduling test suites to run overnight, teams can receive feedback on what needs to be fixed the next day. This process can save significant time and costs in the long run, allowing testers to focus on more complex and critical tasks.
Cloud testing refers to the practice of using cloud computing resources and infrastructure to carry out software testing activities. This involves leveraging cloud-based platforms and services to perform various types of testing, such as functional testing, performance testing, security testing, and compatibility testing.
Here’s an example of how cloud-based testing fits into Spotify’s DevOps engineering culture:
Not only this cloud-based solution is suitable for a complicated, interconnected web music player like Spotify, but also for businesses in the early stages of development and those with tight budgets. Cloud test environments can help reduce costs associated with testing, as they eliminate the need for teams to purchase and maintain their own hardware and software infrastructure for testing purposes.
Cloud solutions, in essence, transform browser, device, and operating system configurations into test environments that can be reused. Some primary highlights of cloud testing include:
To protect QA teams and developers from experiencing poor application performance, the QA environment must mimic the development environment. Emulating the developer environment involves creating a testing environment that is identical or similar to the environment in which the software was developed. You may test your code in multiple production scenarios while imitating customer environments as builds go through the development process. The benefits of this include:
The main goal of a software quality process is to find flaws as soon as possible. The later a defect is discovered in the software development process, the more costly it is to fix. Developers and testers in agile teams do not operate in flexible workspaces. In Agile Testing processes, the testing tasks are split into sprints and is often carried out jointly by developers and testers. Even in an agile process, testers play a crucial role. Automation testing is still at the heart of Agile Development since a consistent and iterative testing process is the surest approach to creating bug-free software.
The Agile testing process for software quality management is designed to be flexible and adaptable, with a focus on collaboration, continuous testing, and delivering high-quality software.
A Software Quality Management process should be at the centre of each product team since it guarantees timely, high-quality product delivery. The outcome of this procedure has an impact on both a company's reputation and financial performance. Hence, it’s crucial to achieve optimal efficiency in these procedures.
KMS Solutions have helped many clients deliver excellent digital experiences with automated testing processes for web, mobile and desktop apps. With strong digital capabilities and rich expertise in technology, our experienced development team was able to help DescoverMarket to:
Read more about the case study of Discovermarket here: