Quality Assurance
What is Quality Assurance (QA)?
The challenge for Product Development is to ensure that the product that they developed actually meets the requirements as set out. Requirements come from Marketing, Technology, the Industry, Users, Legal, Sales, and many other sources.
The second challenge is that Quality can not be tested into a Product, Service or Process. Quality has to be designed in from the onset.
Most products are not winners if they just meet the features as requested initially. Products have to be Robust, Reliable, Available, Maintainable, Supportable, Serviceable, and Perform. Many times the product developer has to sacrifice one of the above to meet the other specifications.
What good is a product if it breaks or falls apart with heavy use? Will customers buy the product again or from the same company if it cannot be repaired or upgraded? If a product’s new upgrade needs other updates or upgrades from other products in order to proceed, will the customer tolerate that (especially if it costs the customer more money)?
Quality Assurance validates that products meet their requirement specifications (user, functional, technical, marketing, legal, performance) and reports issues back to the Product Development Team with examples, screen shots, process flows. Quality Assurance is not about “trying to break the system” or “playing with” or “see how it works” approach. It is a very formal, technical, precise, intentional process. QA needs to be able to reproduce any situation that they observe, document it so that Product Development can reproduce it. The more definite about the steps that lead up to or conditions that caused a situation the more likely it is that Product Development can locate and eliminate the root cause of an issue.
I once found that accidently pushing down heavily on my left wrist while typing caused a PC keyboard to flex and break a wire connection, thus causing an intermittent issue with MS Word. Microsoft could not replicate the random error nor could IBM/Lenovo. But when I was able to document the exact conditions that led up to the issue, all involved were actually able to reproduce it. Leading back to a design flaw in the connection between the Keyboard and CPU board.
QA is a very rewarding career that has visibility into all areas of a company. If a company produces quality products that customers value, the QA team has been involved from the start of the project. QA uses several specialized software products that require training and developing experience.
