4 Key Challenges Faced by QA and Testing Professionals in 2016

As the software quality assurance landscape is rapidly growing and facing significant changes, QA and testing professionals are facing new challenges related to better understanding, managing, and adopting different types of QA testing. Growing use of agile testing has compelled organizations to change their development and QA strategies to fulfill their customers’ needs.

Today, development cycles have become quick and short and both of these have contributed to changes in the software quality assurance definition. It now mainly encompasses keeping pace with the market without compromising on the product quality. Enhanced software quality assurance activities provide several benefits including optimization, quality, process improvement as well as higher productivity. Here are some key challenges that are being continually faced by QA and testing professionals when it comes to maintaining software quality assurance.

1. Facilitation of Quality

Understanding the nature of business is immensely important for a system being verified. Hence, QA and testing professionals need to join hands with product owners to be able to test a product in such a manner that it properly supports the business model. QA teams should be able to be involved in the initial discussions that would help them to act as facilitators of quality.

2. QA Culture

When it comes to performing software quality assurance activities seamlessly, the QA and testing culture needs to undergo a change. Organizations now need to explore innovative ideas to find unique techniques together with different QA testing tools both of which would contribute in testing a product efficiently and quickly. This will also help the organizations to ensure a continuous balance between meeting market demand with a high-quality end product.

3. Early Testing

Like development engineers, QA and testing professionals are extremely important in an SDLC. If testing begins at the early stages of the development cycle, they can visualize different quality issues throughout the entire cycle and provide valuable early feedbacks on sustainable development, feature, scope, and architecture, all of which can greatly contribute to reduce unnecessary delay in time-to-market and high amount of additional expenses arising out of late detection of errors.

4. Merge 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.

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.