Overcoming Obstacles to QA Improvement 

Working with different companies, I have consistently seen the need for QA improvement. It’s rarely the case that companies don’t value QA, but there are often internal obstacles or external pressures that prevent them from investing in this area. These usually include cost, time constraints to release, short-term focus, and overconfidence in their development team/process. 

Cost is a particularly difficult challenge because it isn’t only the project budget, but the price of hiring and training qualified QA personnel and other investments in the process and tools required to perform the job. A perennial challenge is that QA return on investment (ROI) isn’t typically noticed immediately. End user feedback is not usually received until later in the development phase. It can also be difficult to definitively correlate preemptive actions in QA with error reduction so it is hard to quantify the time and cost savings it provides. In my experience, this contributes to the widely held misconception that QA is a loss leader.

Invest in Expertise

Over confidence or overreliance on development is not necessarily common but I have seen this occur often with companies that have budget constraints. Lots of companies I have worked with admit to having fallen into the trap of believing that their internal team can catch all the bugs and can QA their own code to help the company sidestep an extensive and costly QA process. This is almost guaranteed to backfire because the inherent bias developers apply while performing QA for their own code is likely to result in missing bugs, or failing to account for potential end user issues, contributing to more defects in later stages. Additionally, some companies don’t sufficiently consider stakeholder engagement in the QA process, making it difficult to secure the support required to execute as diligently as they should. When you were in school, you wouldn’t turn in an important research paper that hadn’t verified its results and been proofread, so why would you do the equivalent of that (with much higher stakes) with your company? 

How We Can Help

Having strong QA throughout the DevOps lifecycle helps create strong end-user satisfaction and adoption. If you’re in a highly regulated industry, having a strong QA process will also help mitigate risks and ensure that the solution meets all requirements. QA is an investment worth making. With the right perspective and expertise, you can mitigate risk, reduce financial loss, and improve the quality of your DevOps process.

At Veriday, we are deeply committed to the QA process, a prime example of which is our in-house cloud-based Software as a Service solution, Digital Agent. QA is so entrenched here thatit was initially surprising to find so many companies not prioritizing investment in QA. 

Testing as a Service (TaaS) has also emerged as a way to respond to this frequent QA gap, and is an area that Veriday is heavily invested in as we understand the importance of delivering a high-quality end product and how it can help businesses establish a competitive advantage. Quality Assurance (QA) is a critical part of our DevOps process and it is integrated throughout our software development life cycle. Because solutions nowadays go through constant iterations, the QA activities are part of different stages of development ensuring quality is maintained at every stage. If you are interested in learning more about how Veriday can help your business improve quality, reach out to us.