How is Quality Assurance helping IT industry?
In every industry, there comes a point where each and everything become saturated, which simply mean that there is a less space for new development. However, there is always a room for innovation in the developed product. When we talk about the third pillar of the economy, that is, Service sector then we can’t ignore IT consultancy.
IT consulting firms are adopting innovative changes. The transformation from Waterfall model to Agile model and ultimately innovation in Agile methodologies with the introduction of DevOps is the evident picture.
How is IT staffing helpful?
IT staffing is one of the best practices to deploy the quality candidates for the completion of the client’s goal. The recruitments are done to fill either permanent position or the contract position. It reduces the burden of internal HR team who find difficulties in getting the ideal resources.
IT staffing is not only about finding developers to develop the application, but it contains a team of Solution Architect, Business Relationship Manager, Delivery Manager, Business Analyst, Database Engineer, Security Engineer, Project Manager, Team Leader, Software Developer, System Administration, Tech Support Staff, Content Writer, UI/UX Designer, Quality Assurance Team and Automation Engineer.
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Are we Building the Right Product?
A software failure or crashing of the software may lead to serious trouble. A software system controls the entire processes in the various sectors like Civil, Defense, Banking, Retail, Aviation, Healthcare and even in managing daily traffic on the road. If the software fails to work even for 10 minutes, then it will bring a big chaos in our society. Just imagine you onboard in a flight and at mid-air, its software system fails to display the navigation and creating trouble while landing; It will really bring the big chaos among fellow fliers. Thus, developing the software should not be one of the primary goals of the IT Consulting firm, but, there should be given weight to quality assurance too.
What is Quality Assurance?
Quality Assurance is the technique to measure the quality of the product by determining the deviation of its actual behavior from the expected one. For example, let’s consider a calculator program. We enter two numbers to perform addition operation; After, pressing equals button it performs multiplication, so this is the unexpected behavior, hence, a defect could be raised against this unexpected behavior. Once the defect raised, the code will go back to the developer to fix the bug and it will come again in the retest until it works as expected.
Different environments to Assure the quality of the product
Any software, before it comes in public domain, goes through different testing environments to make sure product is defect free. Some of the environments discussed are as below:
- Local Environment: It is the environment of the Quality Assurance Engineer who test the product for the first time in his/her system
- Default Environment: When product successfully passes all the scenarios in the Local environment then developer merges the code in the default environment for regressing testing
- Release Environment: After local and default testing, the product is ready to get released for beta testing, therefore, it further migrates to the higher-level environment where some beta testers are available to test the product
- Production Environment: This is the environment when software is available for use in real time scenario
The Business Model of the IT firm
IT firm basically hires a large number of employees as testers to test the product. These days IT firms have a number of testers than the developers. They hire testers for different environments. Ultimately, the billing load goes to the shoulder of clients. It is very factual that nobody will take the risk to underestimate the quality as downtime for 2 minutes will lead to an extra loss in the business.
Automation Testing is the Future
Robots are replacing human beings in every field, so in the quality assurance too. Here robots are not intervening, but there are some tools which are available to automate the entire testing processes. For example, Selenium WebDriver is one of the leading open source automation tools which is used to automate the entire testing processes.
Automation cuts down the number of resources, hence, it saves the money of the clients. Therefore, demands for automation engineers are on the boom in IT industry. It actually makes testing faster with advanced logging and reporting.
