In today’s digital economy, errors cost money and reputation. Sometimes the issue is a bug in the program, sometimes it’s a design flaw. Despite the fact that most software failures could have been avoided using QA and testing techniques, these methodologies are not always seen as mandatory.
Getting QA right is more essential than ever before! As an increasing number of organizations adopt cloud, agile, and DevOps for faster innovation and delivery of high-quality software, QA holds the key to success in keeping up with the warp-speed of continuous release cycles. Quality Assurance gives companies a solid competitive edge.
Once mostly seen as a supporting function, software Quality Assurance (QA) – the exercise of testing programs to ensure they function as designed and don’t contain critical bugs, is now crucial to business reputation and customer satisfaction.
Cases of reputation and financial losses have touched upon diverse industries and businesses across the globe, including airlines, financial institutions, government offices, healthcare, and the retail sector. The latest ‘Software Fail Watch’ survey identified 606 recorded software failures impacting 3.7 billion people, $1.7 trillion in assets, and 314 companies.
In 2018, a massive data breach at Equifax caused by a bug in the Equifax server code saw hackers compromise sensitive data of over 145 million records. The Apache Struts web-application vulnerability occurred because of a poor QA culture and poor QA practices.
The two fatal Boeing 737 MAX crashes were a result of a QA failure. Strict software QA processes could have easily prevented the Boeing 737 MAX crash.
Recently, Provident Financial, the UK-based loan company, admitted that a software bug in the scheduling system resulted in incorrect schedules and routes being used. This caused issues with collecting debts and resulted in a revenue loss of up to $158,256,000. The announcement saw Provident Financial’s stock lose a whopping $2.2 Billion in market value in one day.
The above examples clearly suggest that software failures can have a devastating negative impact on a company’s brand reputation. The importance of QA becomes all the more prevalent in mission-critical or safety-critical industries because ensuring standards are often a prerequisite.
Quality is one of the key factors that users attach to an application. Quality adds credibility to the company, which leads to increased attention from the user. On the other hand, if your app is unstable, a resource hog, or plagued with embarrassing UI errors, it can damage your reputation and cause people to forget about your past successes.
For successful businesses, quality must not be an exception but a necessity. Failure to deliver on quality results in loss of customers, revenue, and reputation. Review the ways QA helps improve business reputation:
Selling high-quality products enables you to build a strong reputation, and QA is a crucial resource to make it happen. Rigorous QA at each step, early in the testing phase, helps to identify and fix bugs to make the software more efficient and deliver a better user experience. It helps reduce overall costs from buggy, poorly executed software that might otherwise put your application into ‘technical debt.’ A formidable QA process is vital so that you do not ignore potential defects that can hurt the app’s popularity and severely damage the company’s reputation.
Today, the time dedicated to testing and debugging takes almost half of the entire development cycle. By introducing QA early into your process, you do not have to wait for feedback from your customers to detect bugs and defects. This reduces the development time, as it allows you to fix things quickly and efficiently. QA and testing help you avoid frustrations, reworks and the potential of overblown budgets. Robust QA helps detect and fix defects early on in the development stage, minimizing project risks, increasing reliability, and contributing to shorter product cycles. Using new age tools and technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, QA creates a seamless process of continuous automation testing of new features and functionalities. This increases the number of releases to your customers, thus helping you improve the development speed and allowing the company to move faster than its competitors.
Software QA ensures that a company provides excellent products. Over time, quality becomes synonymous with the brand, and ultimately, people seek the brand because of high quality. Higher reliability results in greater customer satisfaction, and customers will naturally tend to patronize the products and services of the company. Today, given the vast choices, consumers will no longer put up with subpar products and any defects in your application will result in the loss of trust followed by the refusal of people in buying such products.
Efficient QA is equally vital to a company internally, as it drives engagement. Having a well implemented and competent QA process that follows best practices can be a source of pride for a company and its employees. Empowering employees to build high-quality software drives a much higher level of morale and productivity. When employees take pride in the quality of their work, they are more engaged and motivated, and more likely to recommend the organization as a great place to work.
QA is key to developing superior products, which not only increases the attention of the users but also enables further evolution of the product and in turn, attracts potential investors. A well-designed, robust QA helps establish a culture of quality that adheres to the best practices of software product standards, processes, and procedures. It also leads to business optimization, meaning more satisfied clients, higher customer retentions, fewer costs of fixing a product, better quality, more reliable products, improved reputation and influence of the company.
Software Quality Assurance is a significant and essential part of SDLC, and when done from the start, it ensures higher standards in development and brand reputation. At Analytix, we bring over a decade of experience performing both manual and automatic testing for several types of clients in various industries. Call (781) 503 – 9003or email sales@analytix.com to propel your business to the next level.
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