How can you test quality assurance and control more effectively?

In my experience it is important for QA experts to learn about the product they are working on from a users perspective, to essentially mimic the moves of the customer so that they can better understand how it fits together and either delights or frustrates in the real world. I enjoy training team members from any perspective, to ensure that they can easily put themselves in the customers shoes.

Quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) are two terms that are often used interchangeably. Although similar, there are distinct differences between the two concepts. Quality assurance and quality control are two aspects of quality management. While some quality assurance and quality control activities are interrelated, the two are defined differently. Typically, QA activities and responsibilities cover virtually all of the quality system in one fashion or another, while QC is a subset of the QA activities. Also, elements in the quality system might not be specifically covered by QA/QC activities and responsibilities but may involve QA and QC.

To test quality assurance and control more effectively, consider the approache: Clear Standards and Guidelines: Establish clear quality standards and guidelines for your products or services. These should be well-documented and easily accessible to all team members.

1. Analysing Requirements 2. Creating Test Plan based on Requirements 3. Setting up the Robust Test Data 4. Finding the most effective Edge Case Scenarios 5. Importance and analysing the use cases as a end user 6. Maintaining certain standards as a team while testing 7. Clear communication b/w Product, QA and Dev Team to make there is no mis-match in the Requirement before its goes live on to production

Quality assurance and control (QA and QC) are essential for products and services to meet desired standards. Strategies include shifting left testing, automated testing, continuous integration and delivery, risk-based testing, data-driven testing, crowd testing, AI and machine learning, fostering a DevOps culture, continuous learning, user-centric testing, regulatory compliance, and transparent reporting. These methods help identify issues early, reduce costs, and optimize resource allocation.

Always keep a folder of templates for UAT, test scripts, RACI matrix templates etc. These come in handy when going through the test case process.

Document your Test documentation. Yes, really. Create a “table of contents” for how you are organizing the testing documentation of your complex outputs. Testing isn’t just a set of activities, but an active E2E logical thought process. Document your testing with an “audit mindset” and make it easy to follow. Take a little extra time upfront to ensure quality, because in data quality the old adage holds true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Automated Testing: Utilize automated testing tools and scripts to perform repetitive and routine checks, which can identify issues more efficiently than manual testing.

Define the test preparation and test execution approaches within your end to end test strategy. Define documentation standards and review output regularly

Process Improvement: Continuously improve your processes based on feedback and lessons learned from past projects. Implement process controls to prevent defects.

Nonsense. Before you have an automated capability you need an manual capability. Many large scale E2E change programs make use of substantial manual test suites and have very limited automation content

Benchmarking: Compare your quality assurance and control practices to industry benchmarks and best practices to identify areas for improvement.

Feedback Loops: Establish feedback loops within your organization to enable team members to report issues and provide suggestions for improvement.

It’s really important to have a holistic view of quality assurance and control . Controls should be defined around the business processes and many companies have clearly documented controls . For any change that’s made to the business process , along with testing for the change itself , there’s also a need to also ensure that existing controls still hold good. Especially important for SOX controls for banks. In addition an automated regression testing needs to be run to ensure there is no adverse impact of the change to existing systems and processes . Vulnerability and performance testing should be part of the standards suite of tests that’s run on any change to ensure security and quality through incremental releases.

An effective quality program encompasses both quality assurance and quality control. Quality control identifies flaws in a finished good before it is shipped to a customer, but without quality assurance you can’t easily identify what is the problem and where the problem originated. Quality assurance monitors the production process, as per defined production processes and product testing. A successful quality program must oversee both control and assurance.