Kanika Vatsyayan November 3, 2021 Establishing a successful startup is not an easy task. More importantly, when you need to create an impact within an already established industry, one thing that can help you go forward on sustainability goals is Quality Assurance.
According to Failory, “Failure is most common for startups during years two through five, with 70% falling into this category.”
Integrating quality assurance into your business model helps you to meet the expectations of your audience and align with their needs. Besides, it encourages your operational teams to create solutions that can foster satisfaction. When every business, irrespective of the industry, is extremely dependent on the use of technology to lead their operations, practicing quality assurance allows startups to lead more organized business ventures.
Quality Assurance & Startups: Exploring The Connection
Right from the banking sector to eCommerce, eLearning, finance, healthcare, insurance, media, retail, real estate, or telecommunication, Quality Assurance has turned to be an essential aspect of the software development lifecycle. From production to resource planning, management, and business development, all these industries have found their own ways of using technology for business advantage, making quality assurance and testing services imperative.
To help beginners understand how quality assurance relates to progressive startup building, we will try to explore the term “Quality Assurance” in detail while highlighting key reasons why startups need quality assurance.
Breaking the term, ‘Quality’ defines the degree of excellence for any product or service with which a startup is concerned. Therefore, the aspect of quality in a startup could be easily related to the reliability aspect of the product or service for meeting the highest benchmarks of design, functionality, and price. On top of that, ‘Assurance’ could be taken as a promise or commitment that brings confidence in customers that the given service or product will meet their expectations.
But, how does Quality Assurance relate to business software technology?
Since software technology plays an important role in defining the success of the startup, quality assurance helps startup owners to have the initial boost. Software testing and QA services help startups to ensure that any dedicated operation or service that depends on the software could meet the quality standards. As for businesses that need custom software technology to lead their services, QA helps to improve the entire development process by providing assistance on:
- Early identification of inconsistencies
- Meeting project requirements, adhering to the comprehensive quality checks
- Testing product at all stages of SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle).
Reasons Why Startups Need Quality Assurance?
There are so many good reasons which make Quality Assurance vital for business. Especially when you are all excited and passionate about taking your startup mainstream, partnering with a quality assurance company is all about yielding business benefits. Let us quickly explore all the reasons why your startup needs quality assurance:
- QA As A Problem Solver
Quality Assurance service providers have teams of technical-minded people who are experienced in handling issues with operational software. Especially when you need to enter the market with a product or service that can solve all the issues faced by end-users, QA helps to make sure that your business genuinely delivers the highest level of service.
- QA To Yield Client Confidence
Making Quality Assurance a priority for all business operations can help guarantee a high customer success rate. Since QA works on testing all the devices, software, website, and applications, it helps you early identification of any possible flaws in your approach to the customer. Above all, QA helps you foster long-term relationships with your clients by providing quality to your customer for all their needs.
- QA Helps To Attain Security
Since security is one of the biggest concerns that customers tend to have when interacting with any business for sharing their personal data, QA helps you to focus on security uncovering all the vulnerabilities, errors, and flaws in the system that can hamper the business process. In other words, QA helps you to protect your business as well as your customer against any kind of intrusion or attacks that might affect your sustainability and success.
- QA For Consistency
Quality Assurance is an extremely important practice for startups that are aiming to streamline their operations with the help of quality management. QA helps to retain consistency in the operations by allowing the startups to act with effective planning. Besides, QA helps testers to monitor the process and aim for modifications that can help to implement business ideas for consistent progress.
Quality Assurance Strategies For Young Businesses
- Focus More
Since startups need a rapid operational pace with limited resources, it is necessary to have precision with what needs to be done, as missing any detail could lead to failure. Therefore, the QA process must be focused on understanding the challenges to have quick wins and avoiding complex systems that need extensive care. This would help you work better and avoid anything that is difficult to care for.
- Balancing Humans & Robots
When it comes to testing, usually two approaches are adopted, which include manual testing and automation. However, picking what works for you needs you to look at your team structure and look for people who are capable of working on the coding part.
Also, it must be understood that manual test cases are easy to write but tough to execute, while automation is harder to write but can be executed quickly. And it entirely depends on your time and resources that what sort of testing can be accommodated in the development process.
Though most startups lean on manual testing in the beginning, as soon as the business starts to thrive, switching to a combination of both turns to be a better decision.
- Organize Test Cases
The initial test cases are easy to write and do not involve any complex coding. But as the project proceeds with the integration of elements, you need to add test cases that are tough to manage. Most of the time, the hassle begins with organizing the test cases.
A quick way to get over these issues is to keep it flat in the beginning as you start with the ten or twenty tests. As soon as it adds to the complexity of the test requirements, you can organize all the pages and test components to ensure all tests can be executed easily.
Quality Assurance Practices & Tools For Startup Success
Since startups are not well accommodated with all the QA operations, there are a few important best practices that startups could implement in order to ensure sustainability.
- Assess The Requirements: The QA process begins long before the software comes into existence. Thus, you can partner with QA Testers to document all the requirements related to the product for creating technology that is consistent, easy to test, and reliable.
- Plan The Objectives: When it comes to planning the objectives, you should aim for all the functionalities to focus on in order to create an effective test plan that aligns with the scope of the project.
- Define A Test Strategy: Testing is a highly comprehensive process that needs a well-defined overview of the budget, time, testing techniques, error handling techniques, and other roles of testers. Besides, test strategy makes the foundation for designing test cases and meeting all the benchmarks related to functionality.
- Test Case Execution: When you are done with the requirements, objectives, and a well-framed test strategy, you can jump on the execution plan. This is usually done in various stages, including unit testing, integration testing, and several other checks made on API interactions, UI, and overall validation of features, functionalities, and performance.
- Bug Detection: The execution of test cases brings out so many bugs and errors that must be tracked, fixed, and updated in the logs to avoid any software breakdowns.
- Result Analysis: Once done with fixing all the bugs and errors, the Quality Assurance services run the checks again to verify the success of the test strategy. This is usually known as the regression stage, where any possibility of errors with the functioning of the system is overruled.
Tools & Technologies To Consider
As testing is a tricky job, the only thing that helps you simplify things is the right selection of test tools. Some of the best free and open-source testing tools that startups could choose to aid their software testing needs include:
1. Selenium
Used by testers for years, selenium is one of the most preferred tools used for automation testing. With extensive support for languages and platforms like Linux, Windows, and Mac; Selenium can be used to test software on most browsers available.
Some of the best features offered by selenium include:
- Parallel test execution
- C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby, and many other languages support
- Low resource demand
- Cross-platform testing on different operating systems.
2. Test Complete
Another open-source and popular tool, Test Complete, brings you complete support on automated test management. It allows you to reduce test costs and improve process efficiency with an easy-to-use interface.
Some of the best features offered by Test Complete include:
- Data-driven testing
- Little to no scripting is required to create an automated test suite.
- Multi-language scripting support
- Create and customize specific plugins & extensions.
3. Ranorex
Ranorex is another test automation platform that helps you create and run scripts. With click and drag features, it does not need any coding knowledge making it extremely user-friendly. Besides, it is highly suitable for qualified QA testers also with its fully functional IDE with features like defect-tracking, source control, and test automation management.
Some of the best features offered by Ranorex include:
- GUI object recognition
- Dynamic web element identification
- Page object mapping
- Cross-platform testing
- Automate testing for legacy applications
- Auto report generation
- Automated timeout handling
- Parallel test runs
To Wrap Up
To launch a startup needs you to dive into an industry that is already established. Either you are planning to dive into the manufacturing industry or aiming to build on-demand applications, eCommerce solutions, websites, or business-specific software, Quality Assurance helps you to align with the highest market standards.
Moreover, Quality Assurance allows you to focus on deliveries as promised while taking care of any bugs, coding issues, or security vulnerabilities swaying your customers away. And if you need to be successful with your venture, it is vital that rigorous testing must be incorporated into the process, making your way to survival and overcoming the competition.
Download my company’s ebook on Manual vs Automation Testing here.
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