Quality is the prerequisite when it comes to software for business. Imagine you want a software for your business, and after months of the tedious development process, you get a buggy app!
Not cool right?
That is the reason you need a plan where you can test and fix issues of your web or mobile application before launch. To execute this, you need a quality assurance test plan which we are going to cover here in this post.
Why your business needs a QA plan is the question we will address. You can also consider this post as QA plan 101, where we will brief you about the benefits of QA engineering solutions and how to create a test plan for software testing.
So, without any further ado, let’s get you started.
What Is A Quality Assurance Plan?
A quality assurance plan is a document that will help your business to get bug-free software for your operations. This document was created by the team which is handling our development projects. The next question to address is what content these documents contain. Allow us to answer that for you.
The quality assurance plan document consists of activities that are meant to make sure that your end user gets a quality product. When it comes to the quality assurance process, there are four tenets that are paramount. These four tenets are plan, execution, continuous testing, and continuous fixing.
Did you notice that the first tenet of the agile-oriented quality assurance process is planning?
Without a commendable QA Plan, there is no start to the QA process, and without a QA process, your business will spend more and more on the betterment of the software because you never get the quality in the first place.
Why Is A Test Plan Important?
Either it is about achieving timely deliveries or cutting the expenses made on resources required to build a product, a well-defined test plan brings you the wisdom to take on upcoming and existing challenges. In broader terms, it is more of a blueprint that simplifies the entire process of software testing while aligning you with the scope of the project.
Besides, a test plan always brings you additional bandwidth that you need to accommodate any additional functionalities. A test plan brings you all the ease and ability to align with test objectives as you can have an overview of the entire progress made on the project. Also, if you need to get ahead of the schedule while saving costs, it allows you to keep in check the process with improved mitigation strategies against redundancy.
Steps To Write Down A Perfect Test Plan
Creating a test plan is not a tough job to foster. However, the only thing that you need to get right is understanding all the presets that are required to be considered for creating software with perfect functionalities. There are six major steps that you need to follow or keep in mind when you need to have a perfect test plan in place.
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Product Analysis: In order to have an integrated test plan for your software product, it is vital, to begin with, in-depth testing of the product. This might need you to explore the features, functionalities, and all other user-specific details that can help create a great solution and offer maximum resistance to possible pain points. This step usually requires a thorough analysis of the market environment so that any product developed can meet the business as well as competitive goals.
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Test Strategy Development: The next big step that you need to take for creating a perfect test plan is to work on test strategy development. This step involves defining various testing practices that can help improve the functionality, usability, and overall performance goals of the product. Talking more specifically, defining the scope, the test types, risk assessment, etc. These are all important phases of test strategy development.
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Defining Objectives: This step is made to have clarity of objectives related to a software project where key testing areas are established while defying any defects, or issues. Also, this step helps the testers and DevOps teams to focus more on test planning and strategizing by extending effectiveness and overcoming any chances of redundancy.
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Plan The Team: Once you are done working on analysis, strategy development, and objectives, you can simply begin by assigning responsibilities. People, hardware, and software, this step is meant to take care of things that need to be handled by specific personnel.
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Scheduling Things: When you have the right team in place, you can simply take on the idea of planning the work breakdown structure. This step requires you to break the tasks into time frames and find the best way to align with deadlines.
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Document Test Deliverables: The process of creating a test plan needs you to run through extensive small and major jobs. Thus, it becomes necessary to document all the information well so that future projects can be aligned for greater precision. Some of the few important documents that you need to create include test specifications, test plans, test scenarios, test designs, test logs, test data, test status, execution reports, release notes, etc.
Checklist For a Perfect Test Plan
Though creating a test plan for every new project is a different challenge, there are a few important factors that should never be missed while creating a perfect test plan. Some of the important factors that help you prepare a checklist for effective QA solutions include:
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Test Items
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Features to be tested
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Approach
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Suspension Criteria
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Deliverables & Tasks
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Resource Requirements
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Schedule & Staffing
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Assumptions & Dependencies
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Approvals
How QA Initiatives Can Impact A Business?
When it comes to making a Quality Assurance Plan, you need to make sure that you are clear with the objectives. Six Sigma prefers to use a predefined algorithm which can help you in determining the quality objectives. To determine the quality objectives, your quality assurance plan needs to understand the problem statement of your customers. Without it, you cannot define a path on which you want to take your process to solve the issues of your customers.
QA Is A Business Analysis Tool
Without a proper QA plan, you risk your business facing unprecedented consequences. With a proper QA plan, you get better at Intel. When you know what are the weaknesses, capabilities, and behaviours of your app, you as a stakeholder can easily make an informed risk mitigation plan for your software’s current release.
Wondering How QA Could Aid Any Business Or Industry?
Read Here: FinTech Industry And The Need For QA
If you don’t value a plan, you are shipping bugs, and I can say that you’re doing it on purpose because you know that your app was not ready, but you released it anyway.
Measuring QA For The Success Of Your Business
This is another benefit which your business can miss if you don’t go for a QA plan. Quality goals are quantifiable and believe me; it is a challenging task without a plan. That makes QA planning even more important for your enterprise. Software quality is a subjective matter, and to identify tangible solutions, you must follow every step of your plan very carefully.
Why Companies Should Have QA Plan?
When it comes to quality assurance testing services, the goals always involve aligning with the client’s needs. In other words, software quality assurance is meant to rectify any problems surfacing during the development lifecycle in order to create more dynamic and thorough technologies.
Pleasing Customer Service
The first reason why QA services must be harnessed by IT companies is the need for creating non-confusing digital products that offer the most organized and well-adjusted navigation. A QA plan allows you to guarantee the proper functioning of the application or software, ensuring no harm is done to the ultimate UX.
Reduced Costs
Making the earliest changes to the development and testing process needs access to a quality assurance strategy. The QA plan you make allows you to prevent any costs that you might need to bear due to doubled work. Besides, it even allows overcoming existing and potential problems within a development lifecycle that might consume the most money.
Continued Improvement
As any development project moves toward the deployment stage, the developers and testers need to check on every functionality for any special attention needed. The QA plan allows you to enhance the process of eliminating bugs and foster greater performance.
Consistent Success
Last but not least, a solid QA plan allows a company to sustain consistency in operations as well as deliveries. A well-defined quality assurance procedure allows for nurturing high-grade products ensuring every product that needs to reach the market must meet the quality mark related to compliance, regulations, and most importantly, competitive features.
Conclusion
If you don’t invest sufficient time and energy in improving your quality assurance plan, your QA success will all be in vain. Resources here play a significant role. To push your QA plan to success, you need support from some reliable quality assurance testing services provider.
Developing your company’s mindset towards strategic & intelligent quality decisions is simple when your Quality Assurance Planning is aligned with your business vision and goals. That is why we at BugRaptors, always focus on QA planning.
Our trailblazing testers understand your business vision and goals. We first make sure that our testers align their mindset with your business goals and then craft a Quality Assurance Plan exclusive to your business to deliver only quality.
Reach us through info@bugraptors.com
