Quality Assurance testing can be a very exciting time for anyone involved on a new development project, because it means your product has reached the final stage in its development. A good showing in QA testing means your product might soon get to market, and start to realize your goals and objectives for it. Below, you’ll find an overview of what happens during this phase, so you’ll have an idea of what to expect.
Finding Problems
This is of course, the whole point of quality assurance. And there are two different ways to go about it, depending on the resources you have to commit to the process. One approach is to issue a general production release right at the outset, and then review the standard report listing all the issues that were identified by your testing organization. The second approach is to work with the firm you’ve chosen for QA to do considerable quality assurance testing before the first production release. This is probably the preferred strategy, and it tends to be less buggy than the first approach. But in either case, you can count on a number of issues to be identified.
Define use cases
Use cases will assist you with the construction of scenarios whereby very different individuals having different roles will be using your new app or product. It’s not nearly thorough enough to just click around your app to root out any issues it might have. Establishing use cases is far more thorough, because it can be difficult to envision exactly how your app might be used by a number of people with different roles and different needs. This is a great way of identifying a number of issues before launching your product, and then encountering some embarrassing phone calls.
Expect some time investment
More than likely, any new app or project you’re working on will take a considerable amount of time during QA testing, and that’s as it should be. While you might be able to rush your product to market more quickly if less time was devoted to QA, it’s much likelier that you would be delivering an imperfect product to the market. This is especially true if your product has some fairly complex integrations, or if it will be used to support other complex systems like customer relationship management (CRM) or possibly ticketing systems. This is a process that should not be rushed for the sake of getting a product to market quickly, because an app that performs poorly will have to be re-worked anyway. And in the meantime, it will cause considerable damage to your reputation.
Enhancements should be staged
The two major levels of installing enhancements are at the technology level and the people level. And each of these has to be tested against the development, implementation and production phases. This will ensure enhancements don’t introduce new bugs to the process. It’s also important to have the right stakeholders involved in testing enhancements before going live. Any time you introduce change into an already established product, it can have a major impact, and you’ll want to be sure that impact is a positive one.
Finding more issues
Regardless of how slow and how thoroughly you’ve conducted your QA testing, you’ll almost always find more issues during follow-up testing. The important thing is to limit any issues that might arise to being relatively minor, rather than having major issues appear. When additional issues do pop up, it will simply be necessary to work with your web team and resolve the issue as quickly and effectively as possible to get your product re-launch back on track.
A professional partner for QA testing
Finally, recognize when you need help. If you need to get to market faster — or if you don’t have a team with the right expertise or enough bandwidth — Growth Acceleration Partners is ready to assist. Contact GAP today to learn more about how our QA testing team can help you get the most out of your project.
