Quality Assurance Experts

This is a profile that analyzes and ensures quality in different types of products and services. QA stands for Quality Assurance, which is related to QM Quality Management and QC Quality Control.

Having a QA profile is essential from the beginning of the project, working in coordination with business, development, and design teams, among others. This professional can assist you from requirements gathering, preparation, planning, design, development, and launch of your services. Their presence prevents errors from appearing when the software reaches the market, reduces delivery times, saves on corrective action costs in the final stages of the process, and provides greater confidence in the quality and safety of the product.

For more information, you can consult this article on the QA analyst profile.

The ISO/IEC 25010 standard, System and Software Quality Models, can be applied as it describes the quality model for software products and for quality in use. This standard presents the quality characteristics and subcharacteristics against which software products are evaluated.

It is part of ISO/IEC 25000, known as SQuaRE (System and Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation), a family of standards that aims to create a common framework for assessing software product quality. The quality model defined by ISO/IEC 25010 is composed of eight characteristics that can be broken down into subcharacteristics for detailed analysis:

• Functional adequacy
• Reliability
• Usability
• Efficiency
• Compatibility
• Security
• Maintainability
• Portability
• For more information on QA standards, please consult the following article.

Quality assurance (QA) is the set of activities planned and systematically implemented to meet the quality requirements of a product or service. These activities include systematic measurement, comparison with standards, and process monitoring, which contribute to error prevention throughout the entire lifecycle.

According to a report by Capgemini and Microfocus, most organizations struggle to adapt their QA and testing processes to agile development. Reconciling the speed and frequency of testing with continuous release delivery requires increasing your organization's QA maturity or outsourcing it. This same report mentions that a large number of companies struggle with testing during sprints (56%) and that it takes a great deal of effort to find professionals with the knowledge to perform continuous software testing (62%).

For more information, you can consult this article on the importance of QA in agile methodologies, this article on trends and foresight in the QA world, and this article on Quality Assurance in e-commerce.

At an initial level, QA can be carried out with basic project management tools. However, as the QA maturity level of the organization and project evolves, the following tools can be implemented, classified by scope of work:

• Test management: JIRA, XRay, Zephy, Testlink, ALM
• Programming: Java, Python, Javascript
• Databases: SQL, Oracle, MySQL
• Frameworks: Appium, Selenium, Cypress, Junit, Testng
• Automation: Cucumber, Specflow, Behave, Selenium, Appium
• Codeless testing: NoCode/LowCode technology for codeless test automation

For more information on QA tools and skills, please refer to the following article.

1. First, you must assess whether the organization's QA maturity level allows for automation. To do this, you need to analyze whether there is a product and a team with sufficient knowledge of manual test management.
2. Then, you propose starting a pilot project on that limited product.
3. Then, you plan to inventory metrics tailored to the company and project maturity, such as: testing hours, number of errors found by the client, number of errors found by development, system size, error detection time, etc.
4. The people who will perform the automated testing must be assigned. Ideally, they should be familiar with the product, have performed manual testing on it, or have access to functional and product testing documentation.
5. Next, the test cases to be automated are selected. If a battery of manual tests already exists, you can work from that list. It is important to classify the tests by type, because not all will be automatable, and some will be more easily automated than others.
6. Classify tests into functional and non-functional (Reliability, Usability, Efficiency, Compatibility, Security, Maintainability, Portability).
7. Once the test cases have been selected, prioritize and classify them according to characteristics: simple, repetitive, lower automation cost, greater business impact. The most common mistake is trying to automate everything. Automation can be done progressively.
8. Depending on the test cases and the type of product, select the tools adapted to the scope and maturity of the pilot project.
9. Prepare the environments, test data, and any additional tools that will be necessary.
10. It is planned to begin automating a batch of no more than ten test cases.
11. The entire process will need to be documented and tracked.
12. For more information, you can consult this article on automation.

• Test Management and Quality Management Offices (TMO and QMO)
• CI/CD DevOps
• Testing strategy design
• Master test plan
• Test plan definition
• Test process assessment
• Testing tool assessment
• Test process implementation
• Functional testing
• Test automation
• Performance testing
• QA training in methodologies, tools, and processes