Importance of QA Testing

What is QA Testing, and Why is it Important for Your Software Development Project?

Quality Assurance, or QA testing, is an important step in the software development process. By discovering defects early in the development cycle, QA testing will save time, money and frustration.

Proper QA testing reveals inconsistencies, errors and redundancies in newly developed software. This process is crucial to ensure that the product being developed can survive the real world and has longevity for years to come.

QA testers interact and nurture relationships with all stakeholders and members of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), which includes project managers, developers, business analysts, writers, database administrators, clients, and so forth. In this way, QA testers help connect everything together and ensure that each stage will go ahead as planned.

Here are three reasons why QA testing is essential to any successful software development project:


1. Saves time and money

Although it may take time to undertake QA testing throughout the life cycle of a software development project, it will cost much less to fix an issue early in the cycle rather than having to go back multiple steps in the process to fix something later. This is why testing should occur throughout the life cycle of a project rather than just at the end or during the implementation phase.

2. Minor change could have major impact

Even if there is a very minor change to the software application, the QA tester needs to understand its impact and test it.

A good analogy is to imagine if there was a small change to the navigation code that an airplane uses, and someone decided it was not worth testing. You likely would not want to fly with that company.

It works the same way for software development projects. If every component hasn’t been tested, you don’t know if it will perform as expected when it is deployed. That small change might just be a lot bigger than expected.

3. Prevents feature creep

Sure, adding a certain feature might sound like a good idea, but during review of the documentation, a QA tester may bring up some possible issues that need to be looked into before going further.

These might include security issues or questions about how easy it will be for the application to be scalable if the feature is added. Implementing QA testing in the life cycle of a software development project can therefore help keep it manageable and within scope.

If you're interesting in learning more about the scope of software testing, we recommend checking out this very comprehensive list of types of software testing.