What are the Challenges a Software Quality Assurance Team Faces During Testing?

Nowadays, software development cycles are continually evolving and changing the definition for quality assurance, as a result. As the software QA landscape grows rapidly, challenges for quality assurance and testing professionals increase. They must improve their understanding of various QA methodologies and adopt new QA testing procedures to cope with new changes.

Agile testing is influencing the development and QA strategies a lot, contributing to various changes. Software QA teams must keep pace with the market and ensure the best product quality at the same time.

New software QA practices offer several benefits such as, process improvement, higher productivity, quality, and optimization. However, QA and testing professionals continue to face key challenges when it comes to maintaining software quality assurance. In this article, we will discuss the challenges a software quality assurance team faces during testing.

Table of Contents

1. Why We Need Effective Software QA Teams
2. X Challenges Software Quality Assurance Teams Face During Testing
3. Effective Test Team is the Key Point of the Success 
4. Conclusion

Why We Need Effective Software QA Teams

High-quality software gives businesses a significant competitive advantage and plays a key role in the success of companies. However, in markets with tough competition high-quality software is not just an advantage but also a basic requirement for staying relevant.

The software QA team helps companies detect hidden errors and defects applications. Identifying and detecting these problems before the product goes live is essential for its success. Without the project testing team, these defects can seep into the final product and affect its performance in the live environment.

If a company does stop bugs before the production phases, the cost of resolving these errors later is much higher. Furthermore, since these defects and errors directly impact the end-user, it leads to bad user experience, which is a prime reason for software failure.

The software QA team not only detects these issues before they affect the user but also helps software teams prevent bugs proactively. Needless to say, investing in a software QA team is not only beneficial to your product but indispensable given the fierce competition in IT.

X Challenges Software Quality Assurance Teams Face During Testing

The software QA team needs to work together to achieve the overall objective of projects. QA Test Managers are people responsible for building these teams. These teams work through shared environments, high levels of interdependence, and ensure QA cooperative agility.

That said, software QA teams need to address several challenges before they can deliver results. Here are some of the main challenges, they should consider.

1. Facilitation of Quality

To accept a system for testing software, it’s extremely important to understand its nature. This is why product owners must join hands QA and testing professionals so they can test the product according to the business model. QA teams need to give their input in the initial discussions because that’s necessary in facilitating quality.

2. QA Culture

The QA culture plays a key role in streamlining QA processes. Companies need to change their testing culture and explore innovative ideas. Without experimenting with unique techniques and different QA testing tools, it’s difficult for organizations to test software products efficiently and quickly. Developing a comprehensive QA is necessary to meet market demands and deliver quality.

3. Early Testing

Similar to development engineers, QA and testing professionals have a crucial role in the Software Development Lifecycle. If you begin testing in the early stages of the development cycle, you can identify several quality issues throughout the whole cycle more effectively.

It’s easier to give valuable early feedbacks and offer solutions on features, the scope of the project, sustainable development, and architecture. Each one of these elements cuts high additional expenses that are a result of late detection of errors. At the same time, it reduces unnecessary delays in time-to-market, giving teams a chance to compete more effectively.

However, as your software quality assurance needs to test code frequently, it’s hard to document everything accurately. You need a fully committed and dedicated testing team that can create self-sufficient stories for testing. Although implementing testing early is not easy, the benefits of early testing outweigh the several challenges it poses.

4. The Merge of Development with Testing

To build an effective development team, organizations need to mix the development teams with software quality assurance teams in terms of knowledge sharing. That being said, QA and testing professionals should be encouraged to have some knowledge about the development process of a product while the developers should be encouraged to take active parts in enhancing test automation infrastructure and should possess knowledge about different QA testing tools.

Knowledge sharing is the key in this situation. Organizations must therefore make the development team work together with the software assurance team. This will result in a developed and effective quality development team.

Developers must learn about the testing process. On the other hand, testers must also have sufficient knowledge about software development. Hence, this will ensure us that the software we are using is definitely of good quality.

5. Time

When it comes to the time it takes to test, device and browser coverage, developers taking up QA efforts, and the small number of hours in a day all add up. If a team needs to test for all of the newest web and mobile devices and browsers, the team is either continually stuck with the cost of updating their device farm, or they’re relying on simulation software to provide accurate representations of the customer experience. Not only is the former expensive, it’s also time consuming. On the other hand, the latter is more scalable but also a less accurate depiction of customer experience.

Additionally, QA can seriously become a bottleneck for engineering teams when developers are stuck combing through a product for bugs as opposed to focusing on the next build. Developers should being looking ahead at what’s next, not stuck critiquing their own creations. Lastly, even with a fully scaled QA process or in-house team, there are only so many hours in the day and only so many hours that can occupy the time of dedicated QA resources. Maybe you need testing overnight, over the weekend, or over the holidays? These duties are simply difficult to impart upon an in-house team.

6. People

Moreover, one could argue for a connection between the comprehensiveness of testing and the amount of personnel available to provide this testing. Scalability is a critical factor in software testing, as the number of testers per test cycle can impact both the time it takes to receive results as well as the quality and overall completeness of findings. Even if a team does have a robust personnel count dedicated to QA, how often are tests running? Eventually, any team will hit capacity, and there will be a backup of scheduled tests. One way of providing against this is with an unlimited testing model, something that is only possible with crowdtesting in particular.

7. Automation

Many teams don’t have automation in place yet and assume it to be the answer to everything. They may also lack the time or resources to get it running efficiently. Many teams don’t have the time to manage automation and subsequent documentation when they’re trying to move quickly. Every time a minor change is made, a given test case might be affected. This often necessitates that someone be hands-on-deck for all subsequent changes. Even issues as simple as broken links (sometimes due to changes in content or functionality on the website), can be hard to keep up with without a large in-house QA team keeping up-to-date on all, even minor, product changes.

If conversations with our prospective customers have taught us anything, it’s that if we want to see real improvement in the QA process, we need to affect the common challenges facing most teams. We need decrease the time required to test effectively, minimize the amount of internal employees needed to test completely, and properly support the development of automation processes. No QA process is perfect, but changes in QA technology — crowdtesting for one — are beginning to address the above challenges, allowing teams to scale and move much more quickly, with fewer restraints on personnel, finances, and time.

Technology is developing fast. The field of software quality assurance has grown rapidly. This growth is making developers face a lot of challenges.

Despite of these challenges, developers were not fazed. On the contrary, they made developers more determined to do good with their job. What challenges did SQA face?

8. Test Coverage

Requirements change as fast as technology develops. There is always the possibility that important testing functions will be missed.

Because of this, test requirements must be traced thoroughly. Maintaining traceability of requirements is most important.

9. Quality Assurance Culture

Quality assurance companies need to explore. In fact, the testing and quality assurance culture must experience change. This change will be resulting in performing SQA activities properly.

Finding unique techniques is a way of dealing with this challenge. Exploring on innovative ideas will help. Product testing will be then be done faster and efficiently. Being able to meet the demand for high quality products in the market will be ensured.

10. Build Verification

frequent builds may increase the possibility of code breaking existing features. Automated testing should therefore be used then. Therefore it is not advisable to use manual testing.

11. Facilitation Of Quality

It is very important for a quality assurance team to understand that a system needs to be verified. The nature of the business must be considered hence. The Quality assurance team must coordinate and work together with product owners and business experts.

The quality assurance team must be involved in discussing about important concerns. This will consequently make them facilitate product quality.

12. Collaboration

Another challenge that the quality assurance team may encounter is collaboration. Involving the team from the early stages of development which, as a result, lead to proper collaboration. Hence making software developed and supported effectively.

13. Skill Gaps

Sometimes, your team members have gaps in their skills and the type of expertise the project demands. As a QA project manager, you have to identify what skills your testing resources lack, so you can create an appropriate training plan for them. For instance, if some of your team members have to improve their testing skills, you should help them close that skill gap.

14. Training and Assessment

In human resource planning, you should consider how existing members are trained and developed to gain the required skills and develop expertise. QA project managers need to create a training plan and apply it promptly to fill in the talent gap. 

15. Evaluation

Putting your testing resources is not sufficient on its own. Instead, it’s important for QA project managers to monitor and evaluate these programs frequently, so they can ensure they are effective. 

For instance, you can work on your developer’s training expertise by assessing his progress and assigning him different tasks to see if he has learned from the training initiatives. If the developer is finds testing difficult, the manager should either replace him or consider an alternative training method.

Effective Test Team is the Key Point of the Success

QA teams build the testing infrastructure, related to automated test design and integration. Since complex software products rely on several testing procedures, QA project managers help create large, multi-dimensional project testing teams to maintain the best software quality.

As DevOps principles slowly become the norm, development environments too will become more agile in terms of roles and responsibilities. Because integrated DevOps environments don’t have the space to focus on standards and procedures separately, QA might become a regular feature of the development process with time.

Here are a few ways Quality Assurance, influences application development nowadays:

• As QA ensures the implementation of standard requirements and procedures, the planned course of action by the QA team guarantees product quality and success. 
• QA helps the entire software team in terms of reporting paperwork, documentation, and associated data. 
• QA ensures that the all essential procedures are being followed throughout the entire development cycle. 
• QA team performs activities such as testing, process monitoring, audits, as well as product evaluation to improve productivity.
• QA gives a transparent outlook of collaboration and management for DevOps teams. 

Finally, an efficient testing strategy should comprise of different types of QA testing that include manual, automated and exploratory testing. All of these contribute to effectively tighten the release cycles and lower risks. Three types of QA testing have to be included in a robust testing strategy. These are unit tests to validate trivial components, integration tests to validate the compatibility of the components and functional tests to validate end-user scenarios.

Conclusion

The field of quality assurance is a continuous learning process. Even experts still need to continue learning. Quality assurance depend on feedback to make them effective.

Primarily, the concern of quality assurance is to give end users software of the best quality. To do this, QA must work together with other teams so they can exchange opinions, ideas, and knowledge,

The never ending development of technology calls for non-stop learning. With all the hard work and dedication of a quality assurance team, they will definitely deliver quality software in the end.

PFLB has served over 500 companies across all domains, from finance and healthcare to retail and technology since its inception. Being one of the pioneering software testing services in the industry, we have implemented the accepted set of quality standards across all different projects and industries.

If you want to learn more about our company, feel free to visit our website.