How Technology Is Shifting From Quality Assurance To Quality Engineering?

Developing software involves operations on various stages and industries are continuously looking for different ways to bring efficiency in this process and meet the demands of the end users. The software development market is striving towards the use of advanced technologies and applications to make a mark in the industry. Technologies such as software quality assurance and quality engineering are being inculcated in the process to eliminate the loopholes that were present in the software development process earlier.

Software quality assurance is one such technology that is being used in the software development process. It refers to a set of activities used for ensuring better quality in the software development process. It checks the development and maintenance of products to continuously improve the process and also ensures meeting the specifications. This process helps in identifying the weaknesses in the product and correcting those weaknesses to maintain the quality of the development process. Basically, it is used to assure the quality of the products.

As the technology is advancing with each passing day, the industries are moving towards the use of these technologies to have a competitive edge and stand out from others. Quality engineering is one such technology that is recently being evolved and used in the developing process. It refers to the management, development, and maintenance of IT systems. It consists of various analysis methods that ensure that the products and services are designed and developed as per the customers’ requirements. These methods and tools are implemented, using a cross-functional approach and involve multiple engineering disciplines.

As the competition is soaring high every single day, the companies are trying their best to attract more and more customers and increase the market share. For this, companies are constantly evolving and introducing new products with better quality and attributes. Today, the customers have many options to select from a wide range of products, so the businesses are thriving towards providing high-quality products. Today, businesses are using quality engineering processes as their highly advanced tools and techniques to have a huge impact on product cost and quality.

The market is evolving at a rapid speed and every process is being shifted to a digital landscape. Now, the customers demand products and services of the highest quality and without much delays. To meet the demands of the customers across industries, the enterprises need to prioritize the development process and focus on key areas to enhance customers’ experience. To achieve this, the industries are moving from the traditional software quality assurance process to the more efficient quality engineering model.

This shift can benefit the industries in a number of ways by making the development process team more agile and efficient. This process focuses on making customer-centric software products. Using quality engineering tools, the quality teams partner with the product managers and users, to understand the requirements in a better way and identify the bugs as the product is being built. Through this technology, the industries can provide a seamless experience to the users and build their trust in the business.

Quality engineering process provides continuous integration and development that was earlier done manually. This process helps in saving a lot of time and efforts of the engineers. It works simultaneously with upstream testing with an aim to deliver better quality right from the beginning of the software development cycle.

This process makes it possible for the quality engineering teams to carry out test-driven developments by allowing them to write code and test it, even before the code existed.

The traditional software development process involved testing the product after developing the software and carrying out the whole process. Rectifying the issues, after the product has been developed meant incurring a heavy expenditure. Through quality engineering process, the testing moved upstream by allowing the engineers to start the software testing from the start of the product development cycle. This process was carried out by gathering feedback and integrating it in the development cycle.

Quality engineering process has allowed the engineers to integrate the quality of entire software development cycle instead of just assuring the product quality when the user accepts it.

Earlier, quality assurance was the last thing in the product development cycle that was carried out using software quality assurance tools. Nowadays, as the workflows are getting complex, the traditional development process is no more efficient as mere “assurance” of the products might not be enough now to achieve high-quality standards. This arises the need to shift from software quality assurance to the advanced quality engineering process. Also, Shift Left testing process has heavily influenced the transition from quality assurance to quality engineering. It is a process in which testing is performed early in the software development cycle. It allows quick localization of the issues before the software is integrated and processed.

Quality engineering transformation will allow the engineers to adopt sustainable methodology and automated framework.  This process will allow the team to execute multiple test cases simultaneously, which in turn, will enhance the scalability of the test infrastructure. It can also assess the progress of software production at each stage of the development cycle by involving the use of data evidence. The test automation strategy is designed beforehand using quality engineering process and the operations and QE teams work together. This way, the engineer’s team is already prepared to validate the functional tests that are being developed.

Quality engineering process allows the testers to implement and verify the code as the product is being developed and also, verify the functionality of the product across multiple devices. The automated testing process also allows the team to get quicker feedback, thereby, rectifying the issues as early as possible.

As the need for software development and testing is growing enormously, the development process needs to involve everything from test automation to coding. This enhanced the need for the companies to shift from quality assurance to quality engineering as it has those newly developed tools and applications, that are needed to take the business forward and improve the development process. It has the ability to code and automate the process which is a great fit in today’s market.

Quality engineering has definitely evolved the development process but it is also important to have the right mindset to adapt  such an advanced tool for software development process. The team need to understand the process and enhance cross-collaboration which is highly needed, when carrying out development process through quality engineering.