Save time and money with Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance. It’s kind of like oxygen. We benefit from it everyday but rarely think about it. Yet if QA isn’t there, it’s the first thing everyone notices.

Quality Assurance affects everything from social media mobile apps to banking software and often makes the difference between a good customer experience or a poor one. PoaTek’s Quality Engineer Bruno Machado gave some insights on just how important QA is.

What is Quality Assurance?

So what is quality assurance? In the tech world, quality assurance is the process of finding bugs or flaws in order to increase the value and reliability of a project. In software development this means finding bugs before the final project is released.

Take online banking for instance. QA ensures that financial software products are secure to protect from identity theft. In return for this security, customers trust the bank with their money.

But banking isn’t the only area where quality assurance is needed. Every software product, web app or mobile app needs rigorous testing to make sure process is simple, intuitive, and bug-free for end users.

In short, quality assurance gives confidence – confidence that your technology is not costing you extra money, wasted time, or the trust of your customers.

Why is Quality Assurance important?

Quality assurance saves time and money. According to IBM “it costs four-to five-times as much to fix a software bug after release, rather than during the design process.” In the long run it saves time and increases value Bruno says.

According to Bruno one of the best values of quality assurance is having a project checked by an outside perspective. A developer has a hard time testing the project “because you did all the effort to make it work, not fail.”

For instance, if a department store is using loan software to manage their customers’ credit payments, quality assurance is an invaluable asset.

“When they [start] to design the solution,” Bruno said, “I would be thinking how could I try to fail this process… I try to think different from the developer or even from the business perspective because I will try to exploit the failures of the application.”

In cases like these and many others, having an outside perspective analyze your software or website is invaluable.

How PoaTek does Quality Assurance

These days QA and Agile Method go hand in hand. Because we believe that the best quality assurance is integrated as soon as possible in the project, PoaTek always makes it a priority to start QA at the beginning if possible.

As a general rule, QA that starts early makes bug fixes much easier and less time consuming. Bruno explained that “[bugs are] a common thing that we could prevent in the early days of the project” whereas they can easily be overlooked at the end of the project. So ultimately an early start on QA makes tech product more reliable.

Protecting Your ROI

Without Quality Assurance, you could end up wasting precious time and money fixing problems that could have been resolved at the outset – all of this takes away from you ROI. Instead of moving your business forward, tech problems could sideline your progress.

Quality Assurance gives you freedom to focus on moving your business forward instead of constantly fixing serious problems. And it gives you the confidence you need to move your product forward.

Want to learn more about how PoaTek’s Quality Assurance can save you time and money? Let’s chat!