Are you wondering about quality assurance testing? Quality assurance and Testing, or QA testing is the process of confirming your product’s highest possible quality for your clients, audiences, or customers. Read the QA testing ultimate guide carefully, and understand what QA inspection is.

In a word, quality assurance and testing work for the best quality of a product by preventing all the bugs, potential bugs, or other issues and ensuring the best user experience before handing it over to the target audiences.

I am here with my quality assurance testing ultimate guide to describe quality assurance inspection, testing, and how to do it.

Besides, you will get to know all the processes of QA testing with the types and benefits.

So, without any further do, let’s get into the QA testing ultimate guide. 

What is Quality Assurance (QA)?

QA refers to the maintenance of the expected level of quality in a developed product or service. For this maintenance, you may utilize special supervision at every stage of the process of delivery or production.

Before going into the details of the QA testing ultimate guide, please understand quality assurance (QA).

So, what is this Quality Assurance?

Quality Assurance (QA) is a systematic process that determines whether a product or service meets specified requirements.

In brief, for establishing and maintaining the requirements set for developing or manufacturing reliable products, QA is a must thing you should do. (Read More: What is Quality Assurance)

If you have already developed your website or software, the QA testing guide suggests you perform QA right now.

What is QA Testing?

Quality assurance testing is the procedure to ensure the high-quality standard of a product.

Suppose, you are planning for a social media app development. In that case, you must prepare some requirements about the app—for example, types, target audience, functionalities, features, etc.

In every stage of your development process, you must ensure that your pre-selected requirements are confirmed. Moreover, before launching your application to the target audience, you should run various tests to meet your needs, expectations, and user-friendliness. This is called quality assurance testing or QA testing.

QA testing works for the effectiveness and outcomes of a product. QA inspection ensures and evaluates a system or its components to confirm that the specified requirements have been met.

Quality assurance and testing play a vital role. In fact, it is an unavoidable step in the software development life cycle (SDLC).

Remember that quality assurance inspection does not involve creating the product but examining the final product’s quality and outcomes.

Why is QA Testing Important?

You have already understood what QA testing is. Now I will tell you the importance of QA testing in this quality assurance testing ultimate guide.

QA and testing are necessary because of their tasks. So what are these tasks?

See the following to understand why QA testing is essential:

• Finds and fixes errors, bugs, and redundancy
• Ensuring seamless UI and UX
• Anticipates and fixes unexpected software flaws
• Confirms logical flow
• Matches customer requirements and expectations

With the above functionalities, quality assurance testers enhance work for building trust and reliability of your company to the clients. That’s why QA inspection is essential.

Benefits of QA Testing

There are a lot of benefits of quality assurance testing. Are you willing to know what these benefits are?

Read the QA testing ultimate guide for the details.

So the key benefits of QA inspections are:

• Improving Production Efficiency
• Creating Cost Efficiency
• Maintaining Customer Trust
• Encouraging the Business Growth
• Building a Better Work Environment
• Saving Time

Improving Production Efficiency

If you can confirm every production element is in good condition, you can meet production efficiency. Quality assurance and testing confirm that you can meet your pre-specified requirements within your target time and elements. After all, you will get efficiency in your production.

Creating Cost Efficiency

Sometimes people think that QA inspection is costly. But you can understand if you think deeply. 

Quality assurance checks and manages quality issues from the initial stage. QA inspection also works for the prevention of faults and repair so that your customer can never return your product.

If any product returns from the client, it costs almost double to repair and resend it.

Maintaining Customer Trust

If you always maintain your product’s quality and meet customer satisfaction, your clients will never be distrustful of you. A good quality product helps to acquire customer trust and recognition.

Encouraging the Business Growth

Maintaining a consistent quality level with customers’ trust must increase your business growth. Even your employees will feel their personal growth with you.

Creating a Better Work Environment

The QA team works with the production team as they ensure product quality in every stage of development. QA inspection removes further hassle after developing a product that makes your workers happy. That ultimately creates a better and healthy work environment.

Types of QA Testing

There are a lot of QA inspection types. For ensuring quality, a QA tester or engineer goes through many tests. Here I add the basic types of quality assurance inspections in my QA testing guide.

These are:

• Functional QA Testing
• Non-functional QA Testing

Functional QA Testing

This QA inspection system works to check every functionality of a product against its previously specified requirements. For example:

• User Interface
• APIs
• Database
• Security
• Client/Server communication

Usually, this testing uses black-box testing.

To know it better, I am presenting some tests that can be navigated through the followings.

Functional testing methods include the following tests:

• Unit Testing
• Component Testing
• Integration Testing
• End-to-End Testing
• Performance Testing
• Regression Testing
• Sanity Testing
• System Testing
• Smoke Testing
• User Acceptance Testing

Unit Testing

Unit testing is a low-level testing method used to test specific components or functions of the program currently being developed. This type of testing helps to understand the core functioning of the code by testing each testable part of the product. It also determines the likelihood that any change will result in a bug, which can be swiftly found and rectified.

Component Testing

After unit testing is complete, component testing enables testers to evaluate numerous units or components inside a single code. This type of testing helps find potential flaws that can appear once the components are joined by utilizing actual data and examining how separate components operate independently without integration.

Integration Testing

The following stage in the Quality Assurance testing lifecycle is integration testing, which determines if your application’s various modules or services function properly together. Integration testing determines if a system or component complies with the necessary functional requirements by grouping various components and testing them all at once.

End-to-End Testing

End-to-end testing aids in evaluating the performance and functioning of the product in real-world situations. It assists in simulating what a real-world situation would look like and confirms that the different user flows function as planned by simulating user behavior in product-like settings.

Performance Testing

Performance testing enables testers to examine the system’s behavior under heavy demand. For example, quality Assurance for Performance tests checks the product’s dependability, stability, and availability by evaluating various components under various loads. They also help to determine whether adding more load would cause the system’s performance to suffer.

Regression Testing

Testing an application after a change or update has been made is possible using regression testing. It checks to see if previously designed and tested software still operates as expected after bug patches, software upgrades, or configuration changes by conducting functional and non-functional tests.

Sanity Testing

Sanity testing, a type of regression testing, assists testers in determining if new code modifications or feature upgrades operate well enough to proceed through further testing. For example, if the program crashes, the system is unreliable enough for more testing, and a new build is created to address the issues.

System Testing

System testing helps QA teams to assess how an application’s many components work together as a whole, integrated system. It is focused on ensuring that every type of user input results in the desired output and is based on evaluating the entire operation of the program.

Smoke Testing

This testing examines the application’s fundamental functioning to ascertain whether crucial system components are operating as planned.

Smoke tests are beneficial in deciding whether additional expensive tests on the application in the newly deployed environment are necessary following a new build. Additionally, they aid in determining if faults are severe enough to reject a potential software release.

User Acceptance Testing

QA testers use the user acceptance tests as the last test in the QA lifecycle. They check if it can handle real-world scenarios shortly before the product is released. It determines if the system fulfills business requirements by simulating user behavior and rejects updates if specific requirements are not fulfilled.

You have to understand various Quality Assurance testing types. Otherwise, you will be confused about using testing. For example, you should know which tests to run at which stages of the development lifecycle.

Non-Functional Testing

Non-functional testing checks the outer area of functional testing. This testing works for the end-user experience. Basically, non-functional tests are for checking the following:

• Reliability
• Usability
• Scalability.

So, non-functional testing includes the following types of QA testing:

• Security testing
• Localization testing
• Usability testing

Security Testing

Security testing ensures the security of your product. It can identify your vulnerability, which gives you an idea of which part you should strengthen your security. For instance, cross-site scripting or SQL injection help in finding the vulnerabilities and malicious files in the software.

Localization Testing

Localization testing is the QA process of adapting a product for a specific locality or region. For example, suppose, you have developed an e-commerce application for a specific community. But you did not add their language to the app. 

In that case, there is a huge possibility that your application will fail. 

That’s why localization testing is important.

Usability Testing

Another testing related to humans is usability testing. The QA testing aims to test the user-friendliness of an application. In addition, it clarifies the software application interface.

The usability test helps to understand whether the target audience can use it effortlessly and effectively.

History of QA Testing

The history of quality assurance testing began with the invention of the computer in 1822. So, you can say that QA inspection was first started in the 19th century. In 1878, Thomas Edison first reported bugs. However, computer bug was first marked by Grace Murray Hopper in 1945.

You will be surprised to know that in 1996, the Ariane 5 flight 501 rocket failed due to a software defect that was worth $8 billion back then. 

What is the Future of QA Testing

Due to the rapid growth of technology and the advent of mobile computing, the test tools and environments for quality assurance inspections require a wide range than ever. 

You must believe that new problems come with new solutions. So, whatever changes will come in the near future in QA and testing, it must include some new tests as an open door.

QA Testing Trends

In this stage of this quality assurance testing ultimate guide, I will describe the top trends of quality assurance testing.

As mentioned above, to keep pace with the fast-changing technology, software codes are also getting more complex. These changes led QA to a diverse range of formats.

Here I include the top 10 QA testing trends for you. These are:

• Test Automation
• Blockchain Testing
• Codeless Automation
• IoT (Internet of Things)
• Cybersecurity Testing
• Mobile Test Automation
• Test Environments and Data
• Artificial Intelligence For Testing
• API and Service Test Automation

QA Testing Skills

For running quality assurance testing, a QA tester must have some skills with hard skills.

In my QA testing guide, I include these skills for you if you want to become a QA tester or hire a QA tester.

So, these skills are:

• Critical thinking
• Flexibility
• Excellent communication skills
• Quick to learn
• Collaboration and social skills

QA Testing Tools

Quality assurance inspection requires various tools for ensuring the quality of your web or software product.

What are these tools?

There are a lot of tools for automation QA testing and both functional and non-functional testing. Some of these tools are:

• TestRail
• Xray
• Zephyr Scale
• Practitest
• Testpad
• Testmo
• SpiraTest
• Avo Assure
• LambdaTest
• Selenium
• QTP

How to Do QA Testing?

At the end of this QA testing ultimate guide, I will describe the quality assurance testing process to you.

There is a misconception about QA is that QA is the work to be done only after the product has been developed. Rather, quality assurance inspection is not a specific step to be done after the development period. It will be clearer if you go through the step-by-step process of quality assurance testing.

QA Testing Process

A quality assurance expert goes through the following steps to ensure a product’s quality. So, these steps are:

• Step 1 – Analyze Requirements.
• Step 2 – Plan the tests.
• Step 3 – Design the tests.
• Step 4 – Execute Tests and Report Defects.
• Step 5 – Run Re-Tests and Regression Tests.
• Step 6 – Run Release Tests.

Conclusion

At the bottom line of this QA testing ultimate guide, I want to inform you that QA is not only applicable to software, web, game, or mobile applications. It is related to every step of our life. So, think of quality assurance testing as a manageable task. If you want to know the quality assurance hiring process, read my “How to Hire QA Testers Guide”.

QA Testing FAQs

Frequently asked questions by people about quality assurance and testing are given below:

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