QA role and responsibilities in Product Management
“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of meeting the schedule has been forgotten.”
Let’s discuss how quality assurance and product management can be integrated closely.
Talking about quality assurance “It is a quality management process that consists of establishing standards, guidelines and procedures to prevent quality issues and maintain the integrity of the product or service throughout its development.”
I have gathered some important topics where we will discuss how QA plays an important role in each product development stage.
- QA role in agile product development
a. Allowing the tester to participate in every stage of development
- From the initiation of the project to its execution, i.e. involving in the very early stage of requirement gathering and development which will tremendously reduce the change in requirement, and overall the project cost will decrease and software quality will increase. For the effective development of the product, QA should actively participate in every activity of the agile like backlog grooming, retrospective, and planning. It will be cheaper to detect bugs and defects at the design and architecture stage rather than after the product is released.
b. Engagement of everyone in the testing process
- It may seem like how everyone can be engaged in the QA process but it is possible, a developer can strictly follow the programming principles i.e. writing high-quality code so it could be easier to test.
- Developer can ensure the quality of the product by following Test-driven development (TDD), i.e. creating the unit test cases before developing the actual code and doing the effective unit testing.
c. Establishing effective cooperation between teams
- There is one popular saying, that “Communication is the key to success “. For the successful launch of the project, it is needed to do effective communication between stakeholders.
- For the proper work synchronization and communication it is necessary to have a good bug reporting and project management tool. Task management tools like Trello and Jira will help to track the work progress.
2. Ensuring quality in product management
a. Effective peer review ensure error are minimized
- If effective peer review is done, then bugs can be minimized and high product quality can be achieved. i.e. discussing the requirements concisely will provide a clear visualization of the product.
b. Review, Revise, and Concise
- As QA engineer, we should ensure that testing standard is met and bugs, error, and distraction should be fixed before any trouble occur
- Revise should be done on what was worked throughout the software process and further research should be done if any fruitful method can be implemented.
- Remember what went well and what didn't go well and keep the records so they can be implemented in future
3. Follow up on the QA metrics and KPI
- KPI means how far the business has progressed towards the goal or with a certain objective. Wondering which KPIs will increase the software quality process, here are some: Test case efficiency, defect density, tests executed, time to test, and defect resolution. These are some important KPIs that will be really good to track the testing goals.
4. Importance of QA in successful product launch
- Through QA, you can build reliable and accessible software applications focusing on UX as with the improved UX, product delivery, and revenue will also increase.
- Never late, it is the perfect time to integrate the testing cycle with the development cycle. So, creating the strategy to ensure the software quality as the development team should continuously keep track of the user requirements and make innovative products.
- QA process should be integrated a little too early in the software development cycle so that bugs can be reduced earlier. Proactive QA strategies will help in detecting errors that might lead to future failures.
- It is really important to ensure product stability as every user needs applications that run smoothly without interruption and crashing.
5. Stable relationship between QA and PO/PM
- It is said that QA and PO/PM are natural partners. Without the effective sync-up between PO and QA, quality products won’t be delivered. So, it is necessary to communicate with the product owner /project manager if you want to deliver a quality product.
- As PO/PM shared the common responsibility towards the product.
Will discuss briefly the black box and white box testing in another article, Happy Testing folks!!!