Every team in every organization is (or should be) focused on quality assurance. Whether someone’s work primarily impacts their fellow team members or a company’s customers, making sure a job’s done right the first time saves money, time and frustration. But a robust QA system is especially important for tech teams. If a new tech product or service hits the market without being carefully tested, the damage to customer trust and the business brand could be irretrievable.
To truly be effective, quality assurance must be the job and commitment of every member of an organization’s team—no one can be on the sidelines. Below, 13 members of Forbes Technology Council share tested best practices for a well-functioning, comprehensive QA process.
1. Ensure It’s A Top-Down Effort
Quality assurance is mission-critical. The CEO and board must send the message that the QA process is a priority of the company. Good QA practices and culture are not an accident; they are intentionally built and monitored. I have seen it time and time again: QA is much more likely to be effective and intentional when it is prioritized at all levels of the organization. - Olga V. Mack, Parley Pro
2. Define Clear Processes For The Team
Quality assurance is the principle of building “in-process verification points” to ensure the desired product quality. A tech leader should focus on defining clear objectives, building strong and concise control points/checklists, guiding the team to follow the defined path, doing periodic reviews, and feeling the pulse of the customer throughout. - Niranjan Limbachiya, KiwiQA Services
3. Start The Process Early
It is essential to begin the quality assurance process early in a project life cycle. QA is too often pushed to the end of a project; when the team inevitably realizes they need more time to “test,” project timelines are unnecessarily extended. - Chetan Mathur, Next Pathway
4. Set Up Quality Gates At Each Project Phase
Specifically in enterprise technology, establishing quality gates at each phase—during discovery, preparation, exploration, realization, deployment and the run phase—is important. The earlier the phase, the more stringent should be the quality gate; this will lead to lower costs in the later phases. It is also important to combine quality with user experience. A quality product has to empathize with the user—that is the key to success. - Deepak Padgaonkar, V3iT
5. Prioritize Transparency
Organizations that deliver the highest-quality offerings prioritize transparency. This is especially true for smart-product manufacturers who must account for numerous interconnected components. When teams are empowered to share emerging challenges in real time, decision makers can swiftly develop solutions that prevent quality-affecting issues from being baked into the final product. - Greg Coticchia, Sopheon
6. Leverage Automation
With QA more focused on automated testing, tech leads should identify needs for automation in their testing process and implement automation practices that will effectively reduce QA time. Identifying skilled resources, tools and capabilities and effectively leveraging automation will go a long way toward increasing the productivity of QA teams and reducing defects. - Buyan Thyagarajan, Eigen X
7. Enable Cross-Functional Collaboration
Collaboration is an important piece of quality assurance that is often ignored. Engaged, cross-functional teams can help you and each other, all while creating quality assurance champions across your organization. - Elena Elkina, Aleada Consulting
8. Be As Objective As Possible About Your Own Work
Make sure that the lead developer of a given task conducts quality assurance on that task in as non-biased a manner as possible. For the best QA, it’s important to think outside of the box about the problem and task at hand and to be as unbiased as possible. More often than not, people close to a project cannot see the trees through the grass because they are so heavily involved. - WaiJe Coler, InfoTracer
9. Set Up A System Of Continuous, Integrated Quality Control
The days of having separate development and QA teams are long behind us. A modern QA approach favors continuous quality control with heavy integration of developers, DevOps and QA professionals, as well as integrated tools and systems tying it all together. Rather than being overhead or an afterthought, a well-formed QA plan saves everyone time and energy. - Dave Hecker, iTechArt Group
10. Test Across Multiple Devices
The key to running a successful quality assurance team is to test your new product/service/website on a multitude of devices. You don’t want to end up in a position where your site loads fine for Android users, but iPhone users see an infinite loading screen. When you check how things work across all popular devices, you’re more likely to get positive feedback and engagement from your audience. - Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster
11. Put A Mandatory Peer Review Policy In Place
The simplest thing that can be done is to put a policy in place across all departments that no single individual can push their deliverable to production or in front of a customer without it being approved by another peer. Two sets of eyes are always better than one. This works for code, design, architecture and copy. It’s much quicker to review everything than it is to fix something in production later. - Andrew Siemer, Inventive
12. Rotate Team Members Through Deployments
Peer review is a highly effective QA practice. It involves the continuous rotation of each team member through multiple deployments, ensuring iterative reviews throughout the deployment life cycle. Leveraging this practice provides fair and rigorous reviews, which validate that the product has met user requirements and market standards. - Roman Taranov, Ruby Labs
13. Document And Test Every ‘Fix’
Document every fix that's made, at least in a ticketing system, to make sure it gets tested. Well-meaning developers may see odd behavior in the code and create “stealth fixes” to change behavior that is actually correct. By documenting the changes, QA can test the scenarios and make sure they were truly broken before the change was made. Small changes can have huge unintended consequences. - Luke Wallace, Bottle Rocket