What is Quality Assurance (QA)?
Quality Assurance (QA) in simple words is a process of checking whether the software meets some special requirements and functions as planned. It is a common practice for software companies to have a separate quality assurance department. The whole QA system is intended to improve the working process, product’s quality and to increase company’s competitiveness.
Software testing methods
The most common software testing methods are:
Usability testing
Checks how your product will be accepted by a potential end-user. At this stage the “user-friendliness” of the app is tested.
Functional testing
Verifies if the product corresponds to the functional specification.
Exploratory testing
A beta tester spontaneously explores the product and finds issues that developers may leave out of account.
Regression testing
Checks whether the modifications implemented didn’t add new bugs.
Test cases
Testers go through a scripted scenarios to check whether the product performs as intended.
Performance testing
Checks how the product manages high load without losing functionality.
Security testing
This kind of testing ensures that the product can prevent data breach and leak of private information.
Localization testing
At this stage, the product’s appearance and its language correspondence to local peculiarities of each region are tested.
Software testing has two main approaches: manual and automated. Manual is performed by a person, automated is performed by a script created by an automation QA engineer.