3 Ways to Level-Up Your QA Strategy in These Uncertain Times
As your QA team adjusts in the new normal – settling into the routine of working from home, your strategy might be changing too. With the sudden shift in culture, work-from-home patterns are forming as tech-companies look into the future.
So, what should you be doing about it? Possibly reduce your customer churn. And in order to achieve that – there should be a micro-focus on product quality. For any tech-first company in the world of software development, this is a sure-fire way to scale and boost your product ROI and reduce customer turnover.
CTOs and QA specialists at some of the leading companies such as Google, Etsy, HelloFresh, and The New York Times follow some of these QA strategies to deliver fantastic products that customers return to time and again.
Here are some techniques or rather ways to amplify your product quality without the expenditure of endless resources.
1. Prioritize QA
Quality is crucial to product success. It means the difference between an app your customers love and a faulty app with low ROI. But why is QA often considered an after-thought?
This is because, traditionally, Quality assurance was considered as a pesky bottleneck, a slow process of fail or pass that meant your release cycle couldn’t move as smoothly as it was expected to. It was considered a bit of a headache.
Leading software quality means ensuring and influencing people around you to so that they prioritize QA. As a leader, it’s crucial for you to communicate openly with everyone involved in the software development life cycle just how important quality is.
If people see an essential set of tests as a bottleneck – explain how it will save costs and improve customer experience down the line, reducing customer churn. Another way of doing this is to walk your teams through the customer journey and explain how important and necessary delivery top quality is.
2. Test early, test often
“Test early, test often” is often the battle cry of any great QA team because bugs are difficult – and even more expensive to fix – the further down the development cycle they are found.
Well, think about it – why fix a bug for thousands of dollars when you can get it fixed for 30$ and less than a day? Early and continuous testing is the key to amplifying your product QA strategy.
By testing earlier, you are not only building testing into the psyche of the development process but helping prioritize quality by putting QA at the front of the minds of designers, developers, and testers alike. At the initial stages of development, you should be asking yourself, “Can I test this?”
Once that question is commonplace, the positioning of quality within your organization will change. Continuous testing is not just a tried and tested method, but a mindset that delivers quality products.
3. Adapt and Overcome
In this pandemic, adapting is something everyone is being asked to do, regardless of their profession or the industry their company belongs to. But how does it apply to QA?
Just because teams now work remotely – that doesn’t necessarily mean the pressure for keeping to lightning-quick software development lifecycles is off.
In fact, there are many tech-first companies in industries ranging from healthcare, gaming to fitness that is seeing an immense increase in customer demand. This means there is an even more added pressure on the dev and the QA teams as more and more updates are put into place.
This is exactly why you need to adapt your current QA strategy as your product scales.
Organizations around the world that are experiencing an expanding user base can enhance and scale their testing capacity by –
- Widening your test coverage to include a range of various testing techniques right from UI, UX testing to exploratory testing to automation testing.
- Hiring extra QA engineers. If your recruitment process isn’t frozen and your budget permits it – this could be a great way to onboard extra team members who could possibly widen your testing capacity.
- Partnering with outside QA experts. Vendors offer a range of different services for tech-first companies to access so that they can scale their QA as well as testing capacity without the time and the high cost of extra hires.
Quality delivers certainty in uncertain times
Every business is striving to achieve some form of normalcy in these difficult times and is trying its level best to achieve a higher ROI wherever possible. These three steps should form the very blueprint for amplifying your current QA strategy so that you can deliver quality at speed and retain your user base, even when times are uncertain.
- Growth through innovation/creativity:
Rather than be constrained by ideas for new products, services and new markets coming from just a few people, a Thinking Corporation can tap into the employees. - Increased profits:
The corporation will experience an increase in profits due to savings in operating costs as well as sales from new products, services and ventures.
- Higher business values:
The link between profits and business value means that the moment a corporation creates a new sustainable level of profit, the business value is adjusted accordingly. - Lower staff turnover:
This, combined with the culture that must exist for innovation and creativity to flourish, means that new employees will be attracted to the organization.