QA Services & Software Testing Outsourcing

Quality assurance (QA) services encompass the processes and practices to ensure that products being developed reach an established quality threshold. The main goal of QA services is to increase the efficiency of development processes by constantly improving on them.

For any software development company, QA services mainly mean using extensive software testing to ensure that applications are as free as possible from bugs and vulnerabilities. It’s important to note, though, that QA services aren’t just about bug fixing – they also contemplate the implementation of best coding practices that produce less bugs in the first place.

Thus, QA services also analyze the development process as a whole and in detail to find opportunities for improvement.

Functional testing refers to the group of tests conducted to check whether the application meets all the requirements as specified by the product owner. Functional testing uses black-box testing techniques, meaning that the tester is only concerned with seeing if the application works as intended without caring about the internal system logic.

The objective of functional testing is almost always getting a bug-free application with a good user interface. That’s why this type of testing includes (but is not limited to) checking data input, expected output, user interface performance, and overall stability, among others.

Functional testing can be divided into specific tests, each of which covers a specific portion of the application. Those tests include:

• Unit Testing. Engineers test the components of the application and each unit is individually tested.

• Smoke Testing. Includes tests that verify whether the critical functionality of the application is working fine.

• Sanity Testing. Developers use this test when they receive a build with minor modifications to see if those small changes have caused new bugs or not. It often focuses on specific functionalities.

• Integration Testing. This test is about checking how the individual components perform when interacting with one another. Integration tests are usually automated.

• Regression Testing. Analyzes all functionalities of the application after changes in code, bug fixes, new features, and updates. It’s more comprehensive and in-depth than sanity testing.

• User Acceptance Testing. Last phase of the software testing process, the UAT is performed by the application users to make sure that it can handle real-life scenarios and that it meets all requirements.

A QA assessment is an expert evaluation of application lifecycle practices from a QA and Testing standpoint. Expert QA engineers analyze the process to identify weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. The main objective of a QA assessment is to suggest enhancements that improve the development process’ efficiency while ensuring continuous delivery of quality products.

A normal QA assessment includes some of the following:

• Business analysis

• Architecture analysis

• Development Lifecycle evaluation

• Test processes evaluation

• Metrics evaluation

• Risk assessment

The end result of a QA assessment is a detailed report with recommendations for improving the overall development process along with a proposal for a successful implementation of those suggestions.

A QA assessment is a recommended practice for companies struggling with their development processes, that aren’t capable of building quality products, or that are failing to meet development deadlines.

Functional testing covers many types of tests but its overall goal is to ensure that the application’s functionality meets the business requirements established at the beginning of the project. To do so, functional testing usually takes two different routes: positive testing and negative testing.

For example, functional testing of a spreadsheet application will involve checking all of its functions, including creating and saving new sheets, opening and editing new ones, using different formulas and formats, exporting to new file formats, and printing, among other things.

The positive functional testing of that application involves using the expected inputs to check whether the application provides the expected outputs. In the example, this might mean testing if the spreadsheet program is capable of exporting an existing sheet to a new format and into a specified location.

The negative functional testing means disrupting the inputs to see how the application reacts. Following the exporting example, the testing engineers might try to save the exported sheet to an unavailable location to see if the program handles the disruption correctly.

Functional testing is usually performed by QA engineers and testers that work alongside the development team throughout the project’s progress. It can be a single person that’s responsible for the functional tests and their application. However, the most appropriate approach to functional testing is to make software engineers take part in functional testing as well.By doing that, the QA engineer isn’t the only point of failure of the team when it comes to QA, as the entire team takes part in functional testing.

Additionally, it’s important for QA teams to get serious about test automation. This minimizes the amount of manual testing while covering as much in unit and integration testing as possible. This expedites the work while providing reliable results and, ultimately, increasing the product’s end quality.