9 Ways to Ramp up Your QA and Improve Your Quality Process

“Quality is the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be the fabric of the organization, not part of the fabric.”-   Philip Crosby

Time and time again, we see a lot of emphasis being laid on the importance of Quality. The organizations take numerous steps to ascertain and implement a well formulated quality management process. However, to realize this, the idea of quality has to be ingrained in its people. It should ideally become a way of work life and not just something read in a book. 

Quality is everyone’s responsibility and should be treated as one of the fundamental business priorities. A well chalked quality management plan should be an integral part of strategic decision making. This plan includes many variables depending on numerous internal and external factors. Organizations keep exploring new ways to come up with plans to improve their process in order to reap maximum benefits with limited resources. 

This article will delve deeper to explore the ways to ramp up the overall quality management process while working within the available framework and not going on an unnecessary expansion spree.

Commitment to Quality

The right attitude towards quality has to be embedded deeply in an organization’s culture. It propagates from the top, hence it is vital that the vision and goals set by the organization take into account the long term impacts on their quality process. It is a well proven fact that the leaders lead by example. The team gets more motivated and committed towards the process when the whole culture is painted with the color of commitment and drive to deliver the best to the customers.

Responsibility

Identify the right people and make them responsible for owning the quality process. Right people working on the right things at the right time can create wonders. The key is to identify them. 

Even if the QA process is outsourced, identifying and getting the right agency onboard holds the key to the whole process. We at Webomates provide services via our proprietary product, WebomatesCQ. It fundamentally improves the productivity of the various development and testing teams by a turnaround time of 24 hours and in some cases even in lesser time than that. Do read more about our product and its benefits in our detailed blog “Webomates CQ vs IT QA”

Quality Process Adherence

A typical quality management process encapsulates three major activities. 

Quality control commences the moment any project starts. It is the product centric element of the QM process.  Quality assurance is the process centric element of any project and lays the ground rules for QC. Quality planning can be either done at project level or organization level.

In a study, IBM Systems Sciences Institute has found that a bug uncovered during the implementation stage proves to be six times costlier than discovering it during the design phase. The cost increases exponentially as the software moves further along the SDLC.

However, having a process in place is just one step towards quality, adhering to it is the accelerant. What is the point having a process in place when the compliance to it is not ensured and monitored on a regular basis? QA has to be the topmost priority. An organization’s reputation depends on how well they adhere to processes and deliver the best to the customers.

“Give them quality. That’s the best kind of advertising – Milton Hersey”. This quote says it all.

Team Synergy

Involve the QA team from the onset of any project. It gives multiple perspectives and can generate multidimensional test scenarios at the time of designing. Additionally, the test process becomes much smoother and faster since the QA team will be better equipped with design knowledge.

Working in silo has never benefited anyone. Knowledge sharing is the mantra to success. Iterative approaches like agile expect a quick outcome with each cycle. This certainly does not imply that quality can be compromised at any level. If the test team works hand in hand with the development team, then the end product of every iteration can live up to the promise of quality.

Identifying and Rectifying The Defects

Defects are a reality, but the important thing is to own up gracefully and rectify them before they get blown out of proportion. Best way to do so is to set a proper tracking system. Identifying defects at the right time, triaging them, reporting them to concerned stakeholders should be a key part of the quality process.

Webomates has a comprehensive defect triage mechanism. We ensure that the stakeholders get the correct and right amount of information to resolve issues with optimal usage of resources and time. We have highlighted the importance of defect triaging and our commitment towards quality in our article “Defect triage: The catalyst in bug resolution process”. It would be our pleasure to answer any queries that you may have regarding our defect triaging process.

Make Automation a Priority

Automation frees up human resources to focus more on other human intensive tasks which can further add value to overall productivity. Automation is a one-time expense but the benefits are far reaching. It is natural for the stakeholders to wonder whether the ROI will be enough to break even the initial investment on automation. We have addressed this dilemma in our analysis “To automate or not to automate” 

At Webomates, we have identified 6 key factors that can help in determining whether to automate or not. Alternatively, let us do that for you using our Webomates CQ service which makes that determination our responsibility. Webomates provides services and AI tool that uses the available test cases and generates the Automation script using its AI modeller engine. This tool also reduces the human effort of writing or maintaining the Automation suite by more than 50%.

CIO applications, a leading technology magazine recognized Webomates as a Top 10 Automation Testing Providers 2019.

Customer Feedback Analysis

This definitely is an obvious one, but note that there are underlying currents, some subtle hints about the quality of work and observations about the process. Catch them, analyze them and learn from them. There is always a learning hidden in every customer complaint/feedback. 

Evolution of QA Ecosystem

Keep evolving the organization’s ecosystem, be it people, infrastructure or process. The team needs to be well equipped with a strong knowledge base and stay updated with the latest technology. You can seek talent within the organization and groom them. It is not necessary to go looking for external talent unless really required. For example, Webomates team started building their AWS skillset during the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We decided to upgrade ourselves to serve our customers better. 

It is always a good idea to invest in in-house resources first. That can be achieved by having a centralized pool of talent. The pool is filled with ideas and learnings from various projects. Those can then become yardsticks for establishing KPI’s for future planning

External QA Consultation

Crowdsourcing is a norm when the resources within an organization run short. It augments the QA process with the element of scalability. It also helps in optimizing the time schedule while working within the gamut of defined QA processes. It complements the in-house team with an external perspective. Identifying the right agency and/or people for the job is vital for this to succeed.

At Webomates, we work continuously to refine our Crowdsourced testing to improve our results with a variety of techniques, ranging from using algorithms to identify which test case to crowdsource to maintaining the high quality of execution. We ensure that we have an effective communication with crowd-users while respecting the customer’s confidentiality. All these factors together help us to scale and provide speed to test the customer’s application.

Conclusion

As it is evident from this article, there are many ways by which overall quality process can be improved without going on a hiring spree. Most of the steps suggested above are taken for granted many times. However, if carefully planned and executed, they can prove to be beneficial in ramping up the whole Quality related setup.

At Webomates, we work relentlessly to evolve our platform and processes in order to provide guaranteed execution, which takes testing experience to an entirely different level, thus ensuring a higher degree of customer satisfaction.

Webomates offers regression testing as a service that is a combination of test cases based testing and exploratory testing. Test cases based testing establishes a baseline and uses a multi-execution channel approach, to reach true pass / true fail, using AI Automation, automation, manual, and crowdsourcing. Exploratory testing expands the scope of the test to take the quality to the next level. Service is guaranteed to do both and even covers updating test cases of modified features during execution in 24 hours.

If you are interested in learning more about Webomates’ CQ service please click here and schedule a demo, or reach out to us at info@webomates.com.

Tags: QA, Qa-optimisation, Qa-rampup