Why You Need a Good QA Plan

When designing a website or product app, marketers often only see quality assurance (QA) as a tool for look and feel that happens just prior to launch. But QA is much more than that. It’s an umbrella activity that starts with evaluating the business objectives for a software development effort.

QA strategy is determined by business objectives and target audience research to ensure your website or app resonates across cultures, language barriers, devices and disabilities, as well as how it performs when site traffic is up and bandwidth is limited. You’ll want to include QA from the beginning of the campaign to establish the goals you want to meet when testing against each of these standards.

Formulating a software QA (SQA) plan is closely tied to how complex an organization’s processes are. Taking this information into account, the SQA plan becomes a living bible for your project’s QA effort. It provides the road map for implementing SQA and is a part of the overall QA strategy that includes why we’re testing and what standards we are looking to meet.

The essential elements of any SQA plan are to establish standards and ensure that test execution contains these elements:

• A test strategy defines what types and amount of testing you think will work best to find any defects in the software.
• A testing plan details the tasks needed to execute to that strategy.
• Comparative test cases ensure the software will meet its requirements.
• Test data consisting of both input test data and database test data to use while you are executing your test cases.
• A robust test environment where you will carry out your testing.