Best practices

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) best practices refer to a set of industry-proven guidelines and procedures that help organizations ensure that the software products they develop meet the desired quality standards. These practices are typically based on industry standards, regulatory requirements, and the collective experience of software development professionals.

Some common best practices that are widely used in SQA include:

Requirements management: This involves defining and managing software requirements, and ensuring that they are traceable, testable, and verifiable.

Test planning and management: This involves developing a comprehensive test plan that outlines the testing scope, objectives, and test cases, and managing the testing process to ensure that it is thorough and effective.

Configuration management: This involves managing software configuration items (SCIs) such as code, documents, and test cases, and ensuring that they are properly versioned, controlled, and audited.

Risk management: This involves identifying, analyzing, and managing risks that may impact software quality or project success, and developing contingency plans to mitigate those risks.

Process improvement: This involves identifying areas of the software development process that can be improved, and implementing changes to increase efficiency, quality, and productivity.

By following these and other SQA best practices, organizations can improve the quality of their software products, reduce development costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

Use a Documented QA Methodology – A documented methodology governing QA processes is a necessity to ensure that your software is bug free, stable, and meets requirements.
Conduct Test Plan Development and Reviews – No QA team should develop the test plan for your software in a vacuum. Look for a QA outsourcing provider that involves multiple stakeholders and the development team in particular in test case development and review. There should be test and quality plan review sessions planned for major milestones during the software development project. These open test plan reviews can also be an opportunity for communications between the groups and the stakeholders with a definite focus on overall software quality at delivery time.
Conduct Root Cause Analysis on Serious Issues – The QA provider you choose should have extensive experience conducting Root/Cause Analysis on any serious issues they may encounter during their QA testing. Root Cause Analysis is an especially critical best practice because the QA team and developers (if required) take a deep dive into the critical problems the QA testing may produce to learn what is causing the issue and remove it so no customers encounter the issue when the software goes into production.
Continuous Improvement – Software and systems QA isn’t just about having a QA group and a QA testing phase in your project plan. You also need to consider QA to be an element of your overall Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) so consider an outsourcing provider that has some experience teaching internal workshops and training sessions to other project team members) can adhere to the highest quality standards and use the latest techniques.
Include a Formal Approval at end of the Quality Assurance Process – A number of large corporations and United States federal government agencies mandate a formal approval of software and system Quality Assurance prior to a new system going into production. If the QA team recommends against releasing a new system into production, there also need; to be an escalation to appropriate project stakeholders who have the authority to overturn the QA team’s recommendation. Such a recommendation should include formal documentation of the final test plan results.