The Importance Quality Assurance and Its Automation

Tech services are only growing more complex. As such, firms are gravitating towards automating quality assurance (QA). Automated testing is fast but stupid. Manual testing, on the other hand, is smart but slow. As of right now, companies are trying to bridge the gap between the two and find the best of both worlds. After all, manual exploratory testing can be very difficult to scale up.

QA is often seen as a path to another position, or a place to retire. To really make QA automation better, companies need to staff their teams full of skilled professionals with lots of business knowledge.

Many organizations would like to have 80%+ automation in 2 years, but they’ve presently only achieved around 30% automated. The UI layer presents one of the largest gaps in automation testing. This is shocking because it is usually where most companies start automating

Often, a professional custom software development service that does well with QA automation will usually have QA professionals with over 20 years of experience, and also a professional QA testing function, as opposed to internal user testing teams. A professional custom software development service can probably benefit from separating QA from development. Too often, developers believe that everything they write is perfect, and they’re reluctant to run it through any kind of testing.

Increasingly complex software leads to a need for experienced QA people that can understand the whole app, not just the one part a developer happens to understand very well. Also, QA people need to know the business. It’s hard for developers to become generalists on end-to-end solutions when software is very complex.

At conferences, QA sessions have become a popular way for companies to share with other companies about where exactly they are in their journey to QA automation.

In the 80s, QA was most often used in nuclear or defense work. In the 90s, financial services and telecom adopted the use of QA. Since then, QA has only grown more important in every business sector. After all, a mistake in code can be costly. Knight Capital launched a new code without removing the old code in 2012. This mistake led the firm to the brink of insolvency. But the mistakes don’t end there. Deutsche Bank used a trading algorithm in Japan in June 2010 that took out a $183 billion stock sell position. Fortunately, the bank managed to unwind a large part of it. In both of these cases, better testing could have led to these situations being avoided completely.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes