Why QA Team Is Important [4 Main Reasons]

The need for Quality Assurance Engineers has been strikingly increasing in the past years due to software applications being more demanded than ever. Here are four reasons why you should invest in a QA.

Who is Quality Assurance Engineer?

Quality Assurance Engineer is a valuable addition to your team. He or she has handful of essential skills which ensure smooth and productive development process. QA’s goal is to provide the high quality product for your customers and clients.

This position is often perceived as just a regular software tester. It’s not entirely true. Testers take a part in software development right at the end of a development process or a sprint, usually in a ‘Test’ stage. They make sure that the app with all its features work perfectly by checking every available use case scenario.

How is this process different for a Quality Assurance Engineer? QAs are involved in every stage of software development. They share their insightful knowledge with Design teams, Developers and Product Owners. QAs find issues and edge cases with the product’s features before they are even developed. It’s easier to do something right from the ground up rather than to fix developed software, right?

Why should you invest in a Quality Assurance Engineer?

1. QA gives a different perspective for your team

One of the first benefits of having a QA in your team is a constant fresh perspective on your projects and products. When your developers glance at an app they see a bunch of JavaScript, HTML, CSS code combined together to create views and features. They don’t perceive the product as something your clients will use.

QAs have the benefit of looking through your customer’s eyes to make sure that everything is as simple and useful as possible. They are great in finding edge-cases, so don’t get surprised when they will ask a lot of questions such as “What if a user types an emoji inside the ‘Name’ field?”. It’s all done for a good cause!

2. Quality Assurance takes care of the project from ‘design’ to ‘maintenance’

As I’ve mentioned above, it’s wrong to believe that QAs are just testers. There’s so much more to this. Quality Assurance Engineers work with your entire team, from the beginning of the project, straight to finish. They start with ‘Requirement Analysis’ where QAs prevent possible bugs and risks and create a test plan as well as a defect tracking methodology.

When it’s the ‘Design’ stage, your QA will work with UI and UX designers. His or her duty is to supply set of testable goals and come up with a test plan. It is done to make sure that everyone knows the requirements for project completion and it shows the overall cost of implementation. When the application is designed, QA reviews it from an end-user perspective.

As the ‘Design’ phase ends, QA is responsible for maintaining the algorithm throughout the ‘Development’ stage. He or she creates a test case that is then later used in so-called ‘Test-driven development’.

3. QA is a perfect link between dev team and the product team

QA is an extremely important link between your Development Team and the Product Owner. He or she fills in as a proxy for the Product Owner, when the PO is temporarily unavailable. It allows your team to keep moving forward at all times.

Product Owner cooperation with QA is crucial for the success of the project. They work closely so that the PO can develop conditions that the product must satisfy to be accepted by the users and customers. These set of statements are called ‘acceptance criteria’.

Where do developers fit in this situation?

When the criteria are established, QA can team up with your developers to create test cases and discuss the decisions that have been made.

As you can see, QA is always in touch with both teams, being some sort of a messenger. PO can entrust the QA to meet all the requirements. Developers, instead of talking directly with the PO, can treat him or her as a source of information about the product.

4. QA in your team saves you time and money

Having a QA in your team will definitely result in improved workflow within your company, and as a result, it will bring significant time and money savings. But how? QA takes a lot of pressure off your PMs and Developers. They no longer have to test the application and its features as your QA will take care of that.

Regular software checks help you find bugs early in the development. It’s much easier and faster to fix an early issue rather than when the app is almost finished. The more complex an app is, the higher the chances are of something going wrong while debugging. Investing in a QA will help you save a lot of man hours, unnecessary stress and will ensure significant reducement in development costs.