How Quality Assurance Testing and QA Services Drive Business Outcomes
Posted by stevemartin on July 24th, 2014
What began as a standard to control defects in manufacturing sector, has now become an indispensable component to maintain the customer satisfaction level across verticals. Even services sectors, where consumption level varies, are increasingly adopting Quality assurance practices to standardize delivery. Not to mention, Quality assurance principles and technologies are meticulously practiced and continuously overhauled in customer centric and quality conscious companies.
Quality assurance is a way to ascertain that the final deliverables both as a product and as a service, conform to approved standards; are error-free and stack up against the customer satisfaction level. A product manufactured by a company or services rendered by an IT/Software Services company, both can be perfected by applying QA assurance practices.
Even within a company, the work-in-progress status quo is subjected to quality assurance by the subsequent receiving department, to ensure optimum quality of deliverables. Thus, quality assurance should be viewed as a scope for “continual improvement, which is an integral part of Quality Assurance Testing.
Quality assurance testing has an ever-exploratory scope. During the process of quality assurance testing, mistakes/ defects in the intermediary stages of the products/ services are highlighted, offering ways for immediate corrective actions and a permanent solution through preventive actions. Thus, quality testing is a never-ending process which is subjected to regular audits and inspections by company’s staff, external inspectors including the certifying institutions.
Quality assurance covers organization of input materials (raw materials/ assemblies/ components/ products), their management and other processes like inspection, testing, etc. There are famous institutions and laboratories, specializing in QA services for their clients, both at domestic/ national and international levels. Total quality management, often referred to as TQM, is the development of quality assurance. It includes quality management systems, consisting of procedural documentation, periodical analysis of the data, auditing and application of many principles like Six Sigma, MSA (Measurement System Analysis), FMEA, APQP and QFD.
The companies rendering QA services should possess sufficient proactive capabilities to be able to achieve better business transformation by delivering prompt, punctual and perfect results so that time bound programs of marketing and customers’ expectations are duly met. To meet these missions and visions, the companies will have experienced and dedicated test consultants, most of them are required to be certified test professionals; equipped with wealth of testing equipment’s and tools, strategic alliances with the leading companies, besides long and renowned presence in the respective fields.
The test scope for both Desktop and web-application are comprehensive. It may include testing of applications, delivery models, feature and functionality, performance, infrastructure, security, load or SQC (Statistical Quality Control). The core benefits of the quality assurance testing would span into reduction or avoidance of production defects, increased productivity, reduction in operational costs and the like.
