Quality Engineering

Quality Assurance vs. Quality Engineering – What your Business Needs

sitemanager — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 14:05:28 +0000

Table of Contents

Quality Assurance vs Quality Engineering
Making a Move from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering
The Limitations of Traditional Quality Assurance Practices
Why is this Change Important?
Conclusion
How can TestingXperts help you with Quality Engineering Services?

As per a survey, organizations with a strong focus on Quality Engineering experience up to a 40% reduction in post-release defects compared to those relying solely on Quality Assurance practices.

Another survey of software development teams depicts, “68% of project failures were attributed to a lack of clarity and understanding regarding the distinction between Quality Engineering and Quality Assurance.”

These numbers clearly underscore the impact of quality engineering and how important it is to know the difference to understand project objectives better, run efficient processes, and ultimately aim for product quality.

Quality Assurance vs Quality Engineering

“While ‘Quality Assurance’ focuses on ensuring the quality of the final product, ‘Quality Engineering’ takes a proactive role in shaping the development of high-quality products and efficient processes. In simple words, QA primarily identifies defects in the software that has already been developed, while QE represents a technical evolution, shifting from predominantly manual processes to predominantly automated ones. Moreover, QE adheres to a ‘shift-left’ methodology and starts test automation early in the software development life cycle to catch and address issues in the beginning.”

Here’s the major difference between Quality Assurance and Quality Engineering:

Aspect	Quality Assurance (QA)	Quality Engineering (QE)
Focus	Ensures product quality through processes and methodologies.	Enhances product quality through a combination of processes, tools, and engineering practices.
Role	Typically, a separate function or team is responsible for creating and maintaining QA processes and standards.	Often integrated within the development team, with engineers taking responsibility for quality throughout the SDLC.
Responsibilities	Setting quality standards, creating test plans, and performing manual testing.	Developing and maintaining automated testing, continuous integration, and continuous delivery pipelines.
Scope	Primarily concentrates on testing and validating the final product.	Broadens its scope to include the entire development process, emphasizing early defect prevention.
Timing	QA activities typically occur after development is complete or during specific testing phases.	QE activities start from the project’s inception and continue throughout the development lifecycle.
Feedback Loop	Feedback is mainly retrospective and used for process improvement.	Constant, real-time feedback is provided to developers to identify and fix issues as they arise.
Tools	Relies on manual testing, test management tools, and test documentation.	Utilizes automation tools, DevOps practices, and CI/CD pipelines for testing and deployment.
Objective	To ensure that the product meets quality standards and requirements.	To proactively build quality into the product and minimize defects early on.
Skillset	Emphasizes domain knowledge, test planning, and execution.	Requires strong technical and automation skills, software development expertise, and a focus on preventive measures.

Both Quality Assurance and Quality Engineering play crucial roles in delivering high-quality software, but they differ in their approach and scope. QE is a more proactive and integrated approach that aims to prevent defects, while QA focuses on post-development validation and compliance.

Making a Move from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering

Moving from QA to QE is a manageable shift that demands a shift in mindset and processes rather than substantial financial resources. The encouraging aspect is that you don’t need the financial muscle of a tech giant to embrace robust Quality Engineering practices. This transformation can be accomplished by introducing adjustments to your current workflows, including:

QA engineering team transformation

Companies have the capability to retrain their current workforce to effectively navigate the shift from QA to QE. This entails a transformation of the organizational culture and the team’s perspective, along with the enhancement of skills and tools. Given that the existing QA engineers already possess a solid grasp of the product, their transition to QE is likely to be more seamless.

Shift-Left Approach

The ‘shift-left’ methodology incorporates Quality Assurance (QA) right from the inception of the development life cycle, enabling active involvement in software design sessions and the formulation of testing strategies. In a similar vein, Quality Engineering (QE) also engages from the early stages of the development life cycle. However, its primary emphasis lies in crafting a comprehensive test strategy geared towards achieving higher levels of test automation.

DevOps Implementation

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) pipelines offer substantial time and effort savings by replacing manual and error-prone deployment tasks. These pipelines complement the ‘shift-left’ testing approach, promoting quality right from the initiation of the software development lifecycle. Furthermore, it’s possible to include automated tests that are scheduled to be executed after each deployment.

The transition from QA to QE is a pivotal step for organizations, empowering them to facilitate digital transformation and ensure a consistent, desired customer experience. Quality Engineering (QE) plays a crucial role in creating versatile platforms that integrate a wide range of tools, utilities, and advanced technologies like AI/ML with lifecycle automation encompassing business processes, functional UI, API, test data, and environments. Additionally, this transition provides superior and highly efficient coverage across both code and functionality, leading to a continuous enhancement of product quality.

Automation Testing with AI/ML capabilities

Equipping testers with automation testing expertise enables the utilization of intelligent test automation, resulting in expanded coverage and enhanced quality. The creation of a sturdy automation framework facilitates a seamless transition from traditional QA to more comprehensive Quality Engineering (QE) practices.

The Limitations of Traditional Quality Assurance Practices

Recent shifts in software delivery have been significantly influenced by alterations in software assurance approaches. The surge of agile and iterative development methodologies is chiefly responsible for these transformations. This shift in paradigm has led to the adoption of more frequent, smaller software releases, departing from the lengthy timelines of the past. It encourages teams to embrace simplified approaches and nurtures a culture of adaptability.

The role of quality analysis has undergone significant evolution due to these dynamic methodologies. To align with sprint cycles, comprehensive system testing is now performed more frequently, typically every two or three weeks, in response to the evolving demands of quality analysis. This represents a departure from the previous, slower paradigm where testing was less frequent and more sporadic in nature.

Transitioning from the antiquated paradigm to these contemporary approaches poses certain challenges.

Continuous Demand for Maintaining Good Quality:

It is essential due to the shift towards agile and iterative development, which necessitates the integration of quality into every phase of the development lifecycle, as opposed to relegating it solely to the final stages.

Focus on Automation:

In this evolving context, automation plays a vital role, and there is a proactive pursuit of testing automation solutions to ensure that testing procedures are both effective and thorough.

Enhanced Functions for Quality assurance companies:

Organizations are gaining increased significance and prominence in response to the changing landscape, as they play a crucial role in ensuring that the ongoing adoption of agile and iterative methodologies consistently yields high-quality software products.

Why is this Change Important?

The shift from Quality Assurance (QA) to Quality Engineering (QE) is primarily motivated by the evolution of service-oriented architectural models. In this contemporary mindset, development teams often conceptualize their business implementations as sets of services that collaborate while maintaining individual functionality, guided by rigorous contractual regulations. This transformation has given rise to a range of alterations and factors to be taken into account.

Challenges for QA Engineers:

Conventional QA engineers have faced notable hurdles, including the requirement to generate code prior to its actual existence, engaging in post-design stages to pinpoint critical tests and essential functionalities, and embracing frameworks that replicate dependencies. These adaptations are intended to streamline the workflow and minimize dependence on both upstream and downstream factors.

Shift in Testing Phases:

Unit testing has been moved to an earlier stage in the development process, and integration testing now demands the participation of QA teams at a much earlier point compared to previous practices. This reconfiguration of the testing stages guarantees a more comprehensive and tightly integrated approach to ensuring quality.

Holistic Software Quality:

The shift towards Quality Engineering (QE) represents a comprehensive perspective on software quality, in which quality is not solely the result of testing but is intrinsically woven into the entire development process. This transformation is rooted in the concept that quality engineering commences with the initial architectural choices and extends through development, risk mitigation, early issue identification, and ongoing enhancements.

Conclusion

The choice between Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Engineering (QE) is a critical consideration for any business. While QA has traditionally focused on testing at the later stages of development, QE embraces a holistic approach, embedding quality throughout the entire software development lifecycle.

In today’s dynamic and competitive landscape, businesses must prioritize not only the end product but also the processes that lead to it. QE, with its emphasis on proactive risk management, early issue detection, and continuous improvement, offers a strategic advantage. Ultimately, the decision between QA and QE hinges on the extent to which a business is willing to invest in engineering quality and ensuring that it is not just a goal, but an integral part of the software development journey. The choice between QA and QE is a critical one that can significantly impact a business’s ability to deliver high-quality software in a rapidly evolving digital world.

How can TestingXperts help you with Quality Engineering Services?

With a proven history of reducing the number of post-production defects by up to 50% and cutting testing costs by 30%, TestingXperts delivers tangible business value by enhancing software quality, reducing rework, and increasing the efficiency of your development processes. By harnessing advanced test automation techniques, our experts help increase test coverage and significantly reduce testing cycle times, thereby saving both time and resources. TestingXperts expertise in continuous testing ensures that quality is upheld throughout the development process, leading to faster time-to-market and improved customer satisfaction.

The post Quality Assurance vs. Quality Engineering – What your Business Needs first appeared on TestingXperts.

Why Should Enterprises Focus on QA to QE Transformation?

sitemanager — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 14:28:32 +0000

Contents1. Why Quality Engineering? 2. Why Quality Engineering role evolved? 3. Why your enterprise should transform from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering? 4. Conclusion

Enterprises are in need of quality products in today’s fast-paced world. Software quality assurance is the key process to ensure quality products. Wikipedia defines Software Quality Assurance (SQA) as a “Means of monitoring the software engineering processes and methods used to ensure quality.” SQA typically encompasses the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) which includes requirements gathering, design, coding, software testing, release management, and the final product launch.

Software testing being a part of the Quality Assurance (QA) has become an important step during the SDLC. This software testing is a significant gatekeeper for businesses to determine when the code could move into the final steps of user acceptance testing (UAT)and further to production.

This QA ensures that the developed software meets and complies with the standard set of quality specifications for a given product. This sort of QA testing deals with testing the software to identify bugs or defects if any, and ensures a quality product is delivered to end-users. The QA function ensures that the product meets the requirements and ascertains the product quality is achieved.In the earlier waterfall model, the QA testing was taken up at the end of the SDLC which led to deferred project timelines, and at times, even the quality was not properly achieved.

The QA team was more involved only in the identification of errors and bugs and retesting them to ensure a quality product is launched. Earlier, even the products were not so complex and QA testing could handle the requirements specifications and test the product.

But, in recent times, the products and applications are complex in their outlook and needed much more effort from the QA teams to ensure faster releases and at the same time maintaining software quality. Thus, there emerged a need to transform from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering.

Why Quality Engineering?

In recent times, the process of software development has moved towards agile and DevOps processes as businesses are in need for faster releases to get to market faster. Evidently, with agile and DevOps processes on the go, the software testing process has taken a shift-left approach wherein the testing is done parallel to software development to ensure faster identification of bugs and quality releases.

The QA in the agile process tests the entire system based on the sprints to cater to software features development.The QA teams take up software testing along with the development process, from the initial stages of DevOps process to ensure continuous integration(CI) and continuous delivery(CD) to ensure faster releases.

The DevOps CI/CD and agile development processes have changed the world of quality assurance. The QA teams have less planning time due to continuous releases during sprints and hence they struggle to accomplish regression testing on time.

Today, the QA teams are required to think more creatively and realistically than ever before. Thus, the QA has taken a shift from Quality Assurance to Quality engineering, to ensure faster releases enforced with DevOps CI/CD and agile processes.

Software quality engineering (SQE) assures high standards during a software development process and specifically holds good for agile and DevOps methodologies. Even in Quality Engineering, the key role is played by the quality engineers who create, implement and maintain systems to ensure quality processes.

Why Quality Engineering role evolved?

1. This change from QA to QE has been evident with more stress given upon automation and automated testing solutions being in place

2. With the connected and complex systems and APIs in place, testing the backend services has become complex as there is no visible UI which led to Quality Engineering emergence.

3. Significantly testing moved differently from unit, smoke tests towards integration, performance, usability and security testing, requiring the QA to be involved much earlier in the software testing process.

4. Today, with the products being continuously evolved as smart products and apps, QA teams don’t always have weeks to analyze requirements and create test cases in isolation and they have to think smartly on the go and rapidly develop test plans as the products evolve

Why your enterprise should transform from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering?

1. QA team in close association with the developers and the operations (DevOps) teams ensure faster and continuous releases by enforcing test automation initiatives and shifting QA efforts towards quality assurance by distancing silos.

2. QA teams follow a shift-left approach of testing to find defects early and speed up the time to market. The shift left allows developers to fix defects more quickly and at much lower cost, speeding time to market and increasing customer satisfaction.

3. QA is involved today to think like end-users and ensure to deliver great customer experience irrespective of the industry they operate especially while testing mobile applications.

4. With the increasing complexity of mobile apps and with IoT devices in place, testers should be more informed with various real-time scenarios and should be able to find real-world defects effectively.

5. In today’s digital age, QA teams need to concentrate more on probable security risks that might arise when data is shared among systems, rather than focusing only on the security requirements of the standalone applications.

6. QA teams are also involved to implement new tools and various automated processes much early in the development lifecycle to ensure faster releases with test automation and even use test automation frameworks to achieve faster releases to deliver quality products.

All the above stated have culminated into a shift from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering and this shift ensures integrating quality into the entire SDLC to engineer better quality. Further, this transformation has also led to a new role of SDET (Software Developer in Test) responsible to build test infrastructure, identify test scope, and define quality criteria. These SDET’s start with unit testing and extend to all other tests and should even build a mitigation strategy in case the situation demands.

They are responsible to manage and maintain CI/CD pipelines to ensure the code keeps moving through the pipeline. They work closely with all teams of developers, operations teams and the product owners. They should also have a deep eye on what should be automated and should be able to plan quickly and efficiently based on the application under test.

As a final thought, though there has been a broader role given to the QA in the agile and DevOps processes with a move towards Quality Engineering, but still they are responsible for analyzing and validating requirements, developing and executing test cases placing effective efforts on automation qa and assisting in the resolution of bugs.

Conclusion

Software quality assurance by the QA teams plays a key role in the SDLC to enable a quality product. Earlier, as the products and applications were relatively simpler in their outlook, the QA teams tested the products and ensured quality is maintained. But, today with agile and DevOps processes on the go and with the evolution of smarter and complex products, there has been a need for the QA automation services to evolve as QE to support smarter and quality testing. This transition from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering assures faster releases with DevOps CI/CD processes and ensure quality is delivered to end-users.

Talk to our industry experts for more queries on QA to QE transformation.

The post Why Should Enterprises Focus on QA to QE Transformation? first appeared on TestingXperts.

Evolving from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering

admin — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 04:50:50 +0000

but for now, just glance at the World Quality Report 2021-22 that surveyed 1750 CIOs and other senior technology professionals (10 sectors and 32 countries)

Contents 1. How to Evolve from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering 2. The Big Burst – Choices, Challenges, and Complexities 3. Why QA needs an intervention? 4. But – How to evolve from QA to QE? 5. QE – More than a Vowel Change

How to Evolve from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering

The report unravels how ‘user satisfaction’ is coming on the top of the stack of most Quality Assurance (QA) and testing strategies. The advent of customer-centred innovation, digital transformations, agile and DevOps approaches, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud, etc. is fuelling this change. But above everything else, what stands out is a list of recommendations that make you reconsider the very role of QA. The report urges professionals and managers to: – Amplify the level of smart test automation – Transform QA and test function to support agile development and DevOps teams – Invest in smart QA and Test platforms, and – Define a test platform strategy and QA strategy on an enterprise level But these are no surprises. When the report noted that 99 percent of respondents are using DevOps in at least one of their projects and that automation is emerging as the biggest bottleneck that is holding back QA and testing today – is it not just iterating what you see in your office and scrum-huddles every now and then?

The Big Burst – Choices, Challenges, and Complexities

We are in a time where devices are proliferating at a never-before speed, where 97 percent of respondents (in the report) show some kind of IoT presence in their products and where Cloud, DevOps, and Agile have ceased to be mere powerpoint enhancers. They are now stark realities that software and application teams encounter and leverage every day. No wonder, there is a pressing need to bring Software Development/Design Engineer in Test (SDETs) into the team; and to inject skills in security, nonfunctional testing, test environments, and test data management among testers. The challenges and context of this modern software/applications world have created a seismic shake. It is a post-Uber planet where only the best will survive. And relying on QA alone is not going to make the cut here.

Why QA needs an intervention?

Quality Assurance (QA) only entails activities for ensuring quality, spotting flaws early enough, code review, analysis, and refactoring. But the users need a stronger and broader variant of this approach. One that goes beyond testing cycles, one that percolates into the culture and the very way developers and designers think about software. Yes, get set for the arrival of Quality Engineering (QE). Quality Engineering transcends quality control, quality assurance, and testing. It is proactive, strategic, forward-looking, intuitive and is way bigger in scope than QA. It is not limited to processes and procedures. It expands into the realm of the way these processes come up – right at the nucleus of ideation and user-empathy. It straddles across all areas of QA and testing and lifts quality to an altogether new level. You will notice that QA is inclined towards some earlier stages of the software development, and had a postcode-writing role wherein QA teams checked what developers had written. But QE is not the fag end of a software cycle. It is a radical way that starts way ahead of where code begins. It permeates the entire development flow. QE helps organizations and developer-tester teams to come together against the onslaught of the diversity as well as the exponential rise of too many devices, platforms, applications, and content needs. QA alone would not suffice to match the speed, persistence, and thoroughness that the Agile development and Shift-Left world demands today. Quality Engineering ensures that quality is embraced early on and is enhanced at every step and desk – and not just at the exit door doormat of software code. It undertakes end-to-end and architectural approaches for comprehensive software quality.

But – How to evolve from QA to QE?

Organizations have to embrace this new culture and mindset to embark on this massive shift. This is where a continuous integration model between developers and testers would come into play. Testing becomes consistent, embedded into code design and gets easy to integrate into the entire chain. Development becomes iterative, collaborative and adaptive. It also entails localization of problems and fixing of individual parts so that all red flags are addressed before the whole software adds up. Organizations will have to usher in a new way of looking at and designing the software development lifecycle. This has to be fortified with sustainable test automation frameworks and methodologies, as well as Continuous Integration endeavours. Resources and bandwidth would have to be furnished so that a test infrastructure can flourish and integrate without any scalability or latency hiccups. Test environments and production environments would also need to be conjoined in a way that quality becomes a precursor rather than an afterthought. Automation of tests might be called for. QA folks might be asked to think and code like a user. This is where the culture and habit parts would face a makeover. Helping and empowering others – beyond organizational silos, dependencies and software hierarchies – will be the new norm for Quality Engineering to get into action. Even the delivery aspects would change- get set for a scenario of multiple releases and entire-system-checks. QE teams are involved and impactful in software design at a new degree and depth; so that core functionality tests can be planned for with a proactive edge. In short, the move to QE reflects but is not limited to, the switch-over from waterfall era to Shift-Left era of software. With QE in place, quality travels right up to the north-most point of any software. QE is about thinking of quality all the time, at every level and by everyone around.

QE – More than a Vowel Change

Businesses in the current era of impatient customers cannot afford to have even a small disruption in their business-uptime. That gives a different gravity to quality. That is where QE shines. And a QE professional is much more than a coder or a tester. Project managers and CTOs are gearing up to tap this new face and fuel of quality. It’s time for a new regimen – one that does more than simply measure.

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