Increasing Importance of Quality Engineering in Software Testing
How can a company win? One of the key criteria is to ensure good quality of its products and services. But the traditional testing and QC paradigm is not enough in the context of emerging technologies. It has proven to be inefficient: if some shortcomings are revealed, the product may have to be redesigned, requiring additional expenses and extra time. That is why something new is being executed in business — quality engineering solutions. Quality Engineering (QE) is the series of procedures by which software quality is analyzed and improved throughout the application or software development lifecycle. It differs from traditional Quality Assurance in that it prevents defects as well as discovers them.
The QE approach implies that every single stage of the product/ software development cycle is under a scrupulous test of quality engineers. Furthermore, the quality maintenance is offered long after the product is delivered. The execution o such strategy in manufacturing or software development procedures guarantees the sufficiency of the output from the very start reduces imperfections, flaws, and reduces potential losses. In other words, quality engineering is the analysis, development, management, and maintenance of diverse systems compliant with high standards.
What are the rewards of Quality Engineering?
With Quality Engineering, the core benefit for your application development cycle is that you are actually making all the proposed advantages of DevOps and Agile more real. Also the teamwork between developers and testers is more real, more in line with the agile ethos. It is also integrated with test management solutions so that the outcomes appear on the dashboard instantly, without a human trigger. With shortened release cycles, time to ensure Quality also reduces considerably. Testers have to be involved at the start of the cycle as they will be setting up the testing environment and framework which will be relied upon for all future sprints. Done right, Quality Engineering offers a great deal more speed in testing. It mainly relies more on Test Automation than manual testing. It is hard to imagine a Quality Engineering function that doesn’t have test automation solutions at its center. Yet again, done right, it creates more flexibility and speed for the whole development cycle. It is not considered just functional and non-functional testing, but every single layer and integration that can and should be tested.
In current Digital era, a Quality Engineer should have experience in programming and be supposed to be able to write software as the situations demands. While the Software Development team focuses on constantly upgrading the application, the Quality Engineering team main responsibilities are:
- Setting up new parameters and standards
- Optimization of test cases, & improving automation efficiency
- Identification of drawbacks
- Generating a plan for improvement
- Plan execution using different tools and methods
- Assessing & implementing new technologies and tools
- Following up to make sure that issues have been solved
- Creating tailor automation solutions to address application specific use cases
- Create frameworks & accelerators that help scale QE across manifold channels, Enterprise wide.
Quality engineering is driven by emerging technologies like AI (artificial intelligence), Big Data analytics and IoT. Automation is the driving force behind turning the traditional testing into an effectual quality support model.
Bottom line
Performance of the application/ software is of paramount importance. Every outage, crash, drawbacks, and even slowing down of the app or processing/ working on a client request has the potential to impact revenue directly. It is the responsibility of QE team to not only identify such issues, but also work on identifying/removing the root cause of such problems. This demands a sound understanding of app architecture, monitoring tools, several enterprise sub systems that are catering to the app etc. Overall, Quality Engineering team provides substantial insights about the root cause or issue and solved it in the fastest possible manner.
