What Is QA as a Service?
QAaaS can seamlessly integrate a QA service into various organization programs, adding competent resources when needed.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.
Join For FreeIn a world where quality is at the forefront of every business, you want to ensure that yours is providing excellent quality results to the customers. It is the most important factor in establishing, preserving, and expanding the brand. So, what is QA, and what makes it so critical to the quality and reliability of a product or service?
Quality assurance is a method of verifying and validating a product or service that entails testing the software to identify and correct any issues before the project is released to users by applying various testing techniques. In other words, it assures that your customers will always be satisfied. Quality assurance as a service is one of the many QA practices.
What Is Quality Assurance as a Service?
Quality assurance as a service (QAaaS) is an on-demand approach to quality assurance that is designed to ensure that quality is built into a product or service and that it meets the requirements of customers by incorporating an outsourced or crowdsourced QA team into development in order to move a project into production faster. It is offered by a variety of independent testers or third-party vendors with a team of qualified QA engineers and the appropriate infrastructure to conduct different types of testing. This service model is adaptable with the correct combination of people, technology, and procedures to provide the maximum project coverage.
QAaaS can seamlessly integrate a QA service into various organization programs, adding competent resources when they are most needed and successfully reducing them when the project draws gradually to a close. So how should it be done? And why would you do it?
How Does QA as a Service Model Work?
Quality assurance as a service can be introduced at the very beginning of the development lifecycle, perform testing the entire time, be used to check a concrete prototype build, or be applied only to validate a single feature of a bigger project. It gives the team complete control over the testing process, allowing it to be as comprehensive as the project requires. QAaaS can be either outsourced (via a third-party provider) or crowdsourced (via a community of independent testers), depending on how it is provided. Both types have advantages in terms of cost, expertise, and scalability.
A team hired through QAaaS is more flexible and adaptive to whatever type of development process your company offers in comparison to a traditional, specified team. In a word, you hire a group of people with different testing backgrounds in various industries, locations, and technologies. As a result, people with a wide knowledge base and different points of view on bug detection bring new perspectives to the testing process. In addition, testing in software QA is usually performed via cloud-based tools and platforms. Therefore, scaling up or down testing resources based on the requirements becomes much easier.
A quality assurance engineer is a person who is not just about testing whatever they are working on but also about advocating for product quality. QA engineers ensure that all possible cases and scenarios have been considered. Testing capabilities and scenarios are more flexible and broad when discussing quality assurance as a service. Because of the large number of testers involved in crowdsourced QAaaS platforms, the most vulnerable areas of the project may be given extra attention and retested by a number of individuals in the real-world environment at the same time. Crowdsourcing in QA as a service means bringing in a large number of independent testers into the process and having their feedback analyzed by a central platform or service.
If outsourcing is involved, a quality assurance provider is represented by a company that offers testing solutions and QA services to other companies as a cloud-based service. All software needs are outsourced to a third-party vendor, which offers various testing approaches, tools, and frameworks, allowing for time and resource savings in technology and training.
Benefits of QA as a Service
QAaaS will benefit organizations by providing increased productivity, staff flexibility, considerable cost savings, and far more effective solutions. In addition, defects are identified and removed on time with minimal losses.
The following are the primary benefits of using QA services for a business:
Simpler and More Detailed QA Services
New technologies and app enhancements can be adopted faster with QAaaS. There is a sense of urgency. The team that is participating in the process is experienced and proficient enough to go straight into the specifics of a given project. The basics can be skipped. QAaaS provides access to the most recent testing tools and technologies, which improve testing efficiency and effectiveness.
Higher Quality
Since a software quality assurance service provider has extensive experience delivering testing services in many industries for various clients, the level of quality of QA procedures is improved. Instead of adapting superior technologies and approaches on your own, you produce better software by incorporating quality assurance as a service team into the process. As a result, at a fixed or reasonable cost, you can build better software while substantially boosting efficiency. In addition, new people in a team with good expertise in the area can add fresh perspectives and ideas to the entire testing process.
Faster Results With Automation Solutions
If you provide automation solutions to match sprint cycles and speed up the process. As a result, you may accumulate your team’s resources elsewhere, where they might be needed. It is an efficient method of reducing time-to-market.
Saved Costs
The ability to attract an outsourced team as needed during the project eliminates the necessity to maintain a large testing team and infrastructure running on a daily basis. The process is more customized in accordance with the original budget and requirements. In quality assurance as a service, you pay for the actual outcomes, which are newly discovered defects, rather than the hours invested in teamwork.
Overall, QA as a service shifts the focus, enabling essential competencies in a company to take priority over less critical activities. In addition, it helps to reorganize the company’s internal development process in order to maximize the results produced by the team.
Published at DZone with permission of Anna Smith. See the original article here.
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.
Comments