Blog by Cigniti Technologies

Why should you standardize your Quality Assurance process

Why should you standardize your Quality Assurance process
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They say quality is everyone’s responsibility.

But what if everyone fulfills this responsibility in their own way, without following any pre-determined guidelines, industry best practices, or protocols?

Due to such an individualized approach, the outcomes of the Quality Assurance process will not be aligned to the overall organization’s objectives and goals.

As each team or unit would use their choice of tools, platforms, and reporting mechanisms, there will be a lack of a standard way in which the QA outcomes can be measured and evaluated. And, a non-standard approach toward QA across an organization becomes an expensive affair.

If we look at the common software development methodologies, from Waterfall to Agile to DevOps, there is still little importance given to the QA function. Especially with waterfall and Agile SDLCs, QA would come at the end of the development process.

Having QA at the end, that too in a non-standardized way, results in two things –

The main purpose and the reason why every organization should standardize its QA process is to ensure uniformity across the SDLC, eliminate the possibility of confusion, prevent chaos, and yield the desired outcomes.

QA standardization vs. flexibility

The debate between bringing flexibility into the QA function and standardizing it is a very important one, and needs to be addressed before we move any further.

Both flexibility and standardization are essential for any function to be effective, whether it’s Dev, Ops, or QA.

The right approach is to achieve the optimal balance between flexibility and standardization in a QA process. However, this may be quite tricky to do.

One practice that organizations can follow is to standardize the processes around testing such as reporting and tool selection, while allowing flexibility in the actual testing process.

Flexibility is necessary for QA practitioners to take a creative approach and uncover vulnerabilities & find bugs for which a standardized approach may or may not suffice.

Therefore, it is all about finding the right balance.

Best practices for Software Quality Assurance

Having best practices laid out in an organization for software quality assurance guides the testers as well as all the stakeholders involved to the ideal path for maximum QA efficiency.

Some of the best practices that should be followed for quality assurance and testing are:

TCoE for QA maturity

Any business or organization needs a TCoE to:

Also read: 7 reasons why you need a testing center of excellence

A testing center of excellence centralizes the software testing and QA practice across an enterprise, enabling them to focus on innovation.

How can we help

Cigniti’s Testing Center of Excellence creates a centralized testing function, helps improve efficiency, optimizes people/tool utilization, and reduces testing costs. Our TCoE services combine the deep understanding of industry best practices and decade-long expertise in software testing services delivery.

Cigniti’s ability to set up cross-functional TCoE in business organizations removes redundancies, streamlines testing processes and hence accelerates the entire software testing life cycle. Our TCoE Services are unique as we not only take up the end-to-end QA ownership but also provide complimentary testing R&D expertise in the form of IP and test accelerators. To handle sporadic service demand, we also offer a ‘Shared Pool’ model of engagement.

We have established Software Testing Centers of Excellence around Mobile, Performance, and Security Testing. We have set up dedicated labs within the organization, which our clients leverage for gaining maximum benefit from their QA investment. Our TCoEs are powered by the strong strategic partnerships with leading test tool vendors and our test professionals have profound expertise in handling various commercial and open-source testing tools.

Connect with our QA experts today!

Author

  • Cigniti is the world’s leading AI & IP-led Digital Assurance and Digital Engineering services company with offices in India, the USA, Canada, the UK, the UAE, Australia, South Africa, the Czech Republic, and Singapore. We help companies accelerate their digital transformation journey across various stages of digital adoption and help them achieve market leadership.

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