What is quality assurance and its objectives in programming?

In many careers that deal with the production of products, quality assurance is very important. Quality assurance ensures that products are safe before handing them over to customers. Quality assurance is abridged as QA testing.

Whether it is in the world of manufacturing, construction, health, software development etc. products ought to meet requirements and specifications. In the world of software development, quality assurance is the crucial assessment of software products to make sure that it meets the requirements and specifications.

Quality assurance in software testing

Quality assurance in software testing is of the utmost importance since the product will be provided to a customer by the company. QA aims to ensure that the software development process is improved so as to make it efficient and effective. This will definitely yield high-quality software.

How quality assurance is done

QA is broken down into a defined cycle known as the deming cycle, or the PDCA cycle. These cycles are:

• Plan
• Do
• Check
• Act

These steps are iterative, meaning they can be repeated in order to ensure that the processes followed are assessed and enhanced. The following is a detailed definition of all essential processes:

• Plan: The company makes a plan to establish objectives and goals.

• Do: The company creates and tests the standardized processes and makes changes to the traditional workflow if they fail to meet standards.

• Check: The process is monitored, modified, and evaluated to see whether those changes meet the predetermined objectives.

• Act: In this phase, actions are executed to make sure that key improvements are made in the process.

QA is a powerful tool to make sure that a product is designed and implemented based on the right procedures. This will ensure that errors and problems are identified.

Objectives of quality assurance

Below are five of the major objectives of Quality Assurance:

1. It helps monitor the software development process and the final software developed.
2. It ensures that the software project is implementing the standards and procedures set by the management.
3. It helps in the notification of groups and individuals about its activities and results.
4. It ensures that the issues, which are not solved within the software, are addressed by the upper management.
5. It helps identify and fix deficiencies in the product, process, or standards.