Quality management in development and software testing

Quality Management is the process of managing company activities and processes that are carried out to ensure the highest possible quality of the solutions delivered to clients, throughout their entire life cycle. In this article, we will focus on the benefits of quality management in an IT company as well as the processes that are an integral part of quality management, including software testing.

Innovative products as well as solutions drive the current era full of technological advances. However, in order to ensure the credibility of the company and guarantee the quality of the resulting products, it is essential not to underestimate quality management within the management structure. The main advantages of quality management include:

• better understanding of customer needs and requirements,
• greater efficiency in the quality assurance process for products and services,
• increased customer satisfaction,
• increased profit,
• visible progress in internal communication and employee participation.

Three parts of quality management

If we talk about quality management of products and services, it is necessary to mention three processes that occur during quality management (Quality Assurance) in a company, namely planning, quality assurance and quality control.

1. Quality planning by the manager

This process includes defining project goals, objectives, procedures and relevant quality standards, setting criteria for products and services delivered as well as testing requirements, assigning responsibilities to individual team members, changing documentation and measuring the quality process. Individual processes must be planned by the project manager or supervisor and documented.

2. Quality assurance in product development

The second process in quality management is quality assurance. It is a systematic process of determining whether a product or service meets the specified customer requirements and predefined standards and norms, and whether it conforms to the project brief and specification. Verification and validation activities are used to check how the software reflects the requirements:

• Verification is used to determine whether a sub-product conforms to specified requirements.
• Validation verifies that the complete/partial product meets the customer’s requirements.

An important part of Quality Assurance is also software testing to find functional, content, logical and system errors, deficiencies, defects or missing requirements. The goal of testing is to ensure that the software product meets the expected implicit as well as explicit requirements and that it contains no critical bugs or as few possible bugs as possible. There are different types of software testing such as: functional testing, integration testing, regression testing, alpha and beta testing, accessibility testing and negative testing.

Testing is carried out by a software tester, who can specialize in either manual or automated testing. Depending on this, the IT tester’s salary and job description will be determined. Read more about the job of an IT tester – what does it do and what are the benefits of working as a tester on our blog.

The primary benefits of software testing are quality assurance, security and better performance of the product and the development process, client satisfaction, and cost reduction due to earlier detection of defects and their immediate correction. Thus, underestimating software testing can have a negative impact on the functionality, quality and security of the software.

3. Quality control in software development

The last process in quality management is the inspection aspect of quality management. Quality control is primarily about comparing the final product with the established requirements, quality standards or technical specifications of all stakeholders in order to eliminate unsatisfactory results and create a product or service that meets all established requirements.

The software tester has a big role in ensuring the quality of the software product. If you would like to participate in software testing in an international IT company, get attractive company benefits and work as one of our expert testers on interesting IT projects, the job of IT tester or automated tester is right for you. Take a look at our latest job offers for testers and kick-start your IT career at msg life Slovakia!