Quality Assurance
Not “solely” testing
Nobody wants the media headlines that can result when a system fails. Even small errors can cause embarrassing problems.
For state government agencies, potential fallout can mean:
- Constituents aren’t served
- Taxpayers are angry
- Money is wasted and costs balloon
- Critical functions (and certifications) are delayed
- The agency’s reputation is at stake
What went wrong? Common causes of failed, late, and over-budget technical projects include:
- Poorly defined scope
- Inadequate risk management
- Failure to identify key requirements and assumptions
- No use of formal methods and strategies
- Errors or defects detected late in the software development lifecycle
Are You Risking Poor Quality Results?
So how is your organization planning for quality? Maybe you haven’t thought about it yet. Are you thinking it’s too early? (It’s probably not.) Or maybe you’re thinking existing staff can do the testing…right? Unfortunately, you run some risks with that approach. We apply the right testing activities at the right project stage, with complete testing for the highest possible quality product.
- Systems need more than the “happy path” approach.
Inexperienced testers often follow the “happy path”—the most common, easily expected way that a function is used. Or they might perform business functions that they know, verify that a particular value appears on the screen, and end the test right there.
But what about batch jobs, forms, monthly and quarterly reports—and the intricacies of your system’s processes? What happens when that functionality has errors?
- Having developers be the only testers can backfire.
Having developers be the only testers can backfire.
Development teams are under pressure to release products. Although quality is everyone’s responsibility, developers may want to cut testing short – or even skip it. It’s easy to overlook errors in your own work, and like anyone, developers need that extra set of eyes from a different perspective.
- Non-QA resources can make for inefficiencies.
It just makes sense: QA resources for QA work are the most efficient. Your developers and analysts need to focus on their areas of expertise, and where they bring the most value. When you divert other roles to QA, you’re taking away time from their work, and you’re spending time getting people up to speed (if they get any QA training at all).
And are they testing that those features “work as programmed” or “work as needed”? QA focuses on what’s needed and on thinking from multiple perspectives–most importantly, the users’ perspective.
Quality Assurance Services – Direction for quality improvement
We can provide oversight and leadership of all quality management activities, not “just” testing. That direction and expertise can help you make quality gains early in the project.
For example, maybe you need to develop and maintain a Quality Management Plan and conduct quality assurance activities. We’ll work with you and your team to identify and establish or review existing quality standards for all processes, procedures, and product deliverables, including project documentation before, during, and after they’re produced to assure quality throughout your SDLC.
At Auctor we will:
- Provide overall oversight and leadership of quality activities
- Collaborate with the Project Director (Senior Project Manager), Quality Specialists, and Process Owners in the development of quality standards and metrics
- Develop and maintain the Quality Management Plan
- Oversee and support the application of quality standards for your project’s processes and product deliverables, including project documentation to their respective team members
- Generate and maintain a schedule of all quality activities
- Review, recommend, or establish quality metrics by which quality can be measured.
- Perform QA activities and QC inspections including but not limited to audits and interviews to ensure quality standards and documented processes are followed
- Conduct process and product assessments.
- Schedule and perform evaluations of process quality assurance reviews
- Recommend tools and methodologies for tracking quality standards to establish acceptable quality levels
- Create and maintain Quality Control and Quality Assurance Logs throughout your project
Quality Control – Testing Types
Auctor’s QA engineers can provide end-to-end testing aligned with CI/CD processes. Our services include these testing activities, and we can customize them to meet your needs:
- Manual Testing
- Unit Testing
- Smoke Testing
- Exploratory Testing
- Functional Testing
- Regression Testing
- Sanity Testing
- Verification and Validation
- End-to-End Testing
- Security Testing
- Automated Testing
- UI Testing
- Integration Testing
- API Testing
- Performance Testing
- Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing
- Database Testing
- Verification and Validation Testing
- Acceptance Testing
- Automated Testing
When releases are faster and more frequent, can your team respond effectively?
Automated testing can help you provide faster feedback, which means that:
- defects are discovered and resolved more quickly, leading to faster implementation, and
- automation tests can be rerun as many times as necessary throughout the release cycle. That saves time in rework
(Source: Link)
Auctor developers write BBD (Behavior Driven Development) test cases using SpecFlow in the data access/Core API layers for each service being created.
With API testing tools (for example, SoapUI), our developers and QA teams conduct automated testing, including a varied degree of load testing. We can also create and execute automated tests for web, desktop, and mobile user interfaces using TestComplete.
- Expert QA Consulting
We can assess your current quality assurance and quality control processes and tools, determine needs, make recommendations, and work with you to design a complete quality assurance process solution that is tailored to your organization. We can make sure that it’s scalable–it can fit your organization now, and still grow with your organization.
That can mean peace of mind, now and down the road. Nobody wants to be scrambling to put out a million fires, and nobody wants to scrap an expensive project that just didn’t cut it. We’ll help your teams work proactively instead of reactively. That means clients are happier. Users are happier. Money is saved. And your staff is happier. Win/win/win.