QA Trends 2021: How to high-power the QA process in 2021

9. april 2021

March 2020 saw the start of a forced journey towards digital transformation for millions of businesses. Activities of all kinds have moved from classrooms, gyms, malls and bars etc. to laptops and smartphones.

This calls for advanced ways of developing apps, but more than ever for a quality assurance process that delivers.

Hiring a manual QA specialist or simply covering the code with automation tests on the last stages of the software development cycle are not enough. The challenge is to create a sustained testing system, which can maintain high code quality, perfect usability, and customer experience on an on-going basis.

5 ways to power up the QA process in 2021:

1. Start testing from the earliest stages of development
Engage QA specialists at the concept stage with developers and Product Owners. Testers are brilliant at focusing on the bigger picture. More than developers, they are able to point out inconsistencies in the product vision even at the concept stage.

2. Develop project documentation alongside the QA team
The sooner things are tested the better. This approach relates to project documentation as well. A thorough review of documentation in the early stages can reveal issues that will be grow more costly the later they are discovered. Based on our experience, developers and product owners can cover up to 80% of product needs. However, they will each see a slightly different 80% meaning that the combined vision covers far more.
QA specialists who are involved early can align the needs of product owners and developers to satisfy the expectations of all sides, including and especially the end user.

3. Develop and test simultaneously
The best way is to break the whole development process into small features and test each of these micro parts as they appear. It is much easier to fix a bug in a feature developed last week than to take care of an architectural bug that was made 6 months ago. Testing alongside development will save time, money and effort in the long-term.

4. Use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
At the Davos Economic Forum 2021, these two industries were announced as the ones expected to boost the new industrial revolution. In respect of QA, they help to speed up testing using algorithms. Regardless of investing at the initial stages of incorporating AI and ML into the testing process, it will be cost-effective in the long run.

5. Adoption of Agile and DevOps Principles
These approaches help to keep up the pace high and quickly evaluate jobs done. Incorporating Agile principles helps to deliver the product to the market faster. This trend is not new but we see no reason for reducing it in the foreseeable future.

At Conscensia, we not only advise on, but also believe in these principles. Our QA team has already incorporated them into their routine. Here are some thoughts from our QA specialists:

Vyacheslav Dyak, Senior Automation QA Engineer: “At my project, we divide the whole functionality into relatively small independent features which are developed and tested in a short period of time. So, when the functional part is ready, most of the bugs will be discovered and fixed. The only thing to do then is to run integration testing to double-check errors related to the integration of small independent features”.

Olha Kavych, Test Lead, Senior QA Engineer: “In my experience, early documentation reviews helped to reveal that when working on the concept of new features some of the existing limitations were disregarded. And if this was not discovered at the early stage it would be, of course, possible to proceed with implementation according to the initial plan, but that would cause costly code refactoring of some really big parts of the system”.