Let’s face it, quality assurance (QA) testing adds hours to the development lifecycle. We could interpret that as: performing QA testing is expensive. However, the cost of not performing QA testing is even more expensive!

What is Quality Assurance Testing?

Quality assurance testing is any systematic process of checking to see whether a product being developed is meeting the specified requirements defined by the client. Quality assurance emphasizes catching defects before they get into the final product. A non-functioning form or a broken image may seem trivial, but they break down your website’s credibility. Users will not return to a website that has too many errors. Depending on the severity of the error, it might only take one error for a user to not return to the site.

When and what should we test for on a website?

Website QA testing requires testing throughout the entire lifecycle, not just prior to turning the site over to the client. It includes testing the site to ensure it works in the most frequently used browsers, there are no broken links, all forms work, all pages display content, and much more.

What about the cost of QA Testing?

There are costs associated with performing QA testing. These costs might include purchasing QA testing tools, staff hours, process monitoring, etc. These costs can also be logically organized as:

• prevention costs – the cost associated with any preventive measures performed,
• detection costs – the cost associated with taking preemptive measures, such as integration testing, and
• failure costs – the cost associated with taking corrective measures to fix a bug that went undetected or the cost as a result of insufficient quality (lost income, extra service costs, guarantee claims, damage claims).

What are the benefits of QA?

By following a QA process, a better product is delivered to the client. QA testing increases the client’s confidence in the product, improves work processes and efficiency, improves the company’s credibility, and better enables a company to compete with others.

Lack of or minimal QA testing generally results in a negative impact on the company due to:

• a website that only partially works,
• a website that does not meet the client’s requirements,
• a dissatisfied client unwilling to provide a positive company referral, and
• schedule overrun due to researching and solving errors.

Although, performing quality assurance testing will not guarantee a 100% bug-free website, it will deliver a significantly better product than a site that was not run through the rigor of QA testing. As mentioned before, the costs of QA testing far outweighs the cost of poor QA testing or none at all.

Next time we’ll talk about the different types of QA testing.

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