What is QA Testing in Software Development? Types, Tools, and Best Practices

If you're a member of the ever-growing IT world or wish to be, you must have noticed how sometimes it's difficult to find all the information you're looking for in one place. If you're either trying to learn some new skills or find a tool that would improve your productivity, or just keep up with all the new solutions appearing on a daily basis, you'll probably have to visit a few websites to get what you need. In case you need updates related to software testing, you don't have to go far from here. We've put up this page where you'll find all the necessary basic facts as well as the information on the latest most sophisticated testing tools used in software development. Scroll down and find exactly what you need to know.

What is QA Testing?

Quality assurance (QA) testing is the process of checking the product's quality to meet the standards and requirements and deliver high-quality software. Software testing is an integral part of the software development process performed both by developers and QA testers. They aim to find all the errors and defects, usually called bugs, as early as possible in the development process so they are fixed before the product is released.

We can talk about various methods, types, and levels of software testing, but the main division can be made between manual and automated testing. As the name suggests, manual testing is performed manually by people. On the other hand, automation testing is performed automatically by testing tools following a code written by automation testers. Usually, these two approaches are combined to test a product as thoroughly as possible.

Would like to learn more about the differences between the two? Which test cases should be automated and which not? What are the benefits of automated tests? Check out our blog on automation testing.

The Role of Testing in Software Development Life Cycle

Testing is an important step in the software development life cycle (SDLC). If we compare Waterfall and Agile SDLC models, we'll see that in Waterfall the testing phase usually comes after planning, analysis, design, and coding. The whole product is tested, bugs are reported, and debugging and retesting are performed. If it turns out that a bug exists in the logic that supports more aspects of the product or any related features, it can be quite difficult and expensive to fix it.

This is one of the main disadvantages of the Waterfall model which lead to the development of agile methodologies. In agile, a product is developed in many iterations and each of them includes testing. This makes it much easier and less expensive to fix the issues detected and provide a high-quality product.

Regardless of what kind of product is made, testing is a mandatory part of the development cycle. However, different kinds and testing approaches are used depending on the industry or the purpose of the product created. For example, when creating banking software, the biggest focus would be on security testing. When testing a website, the major focus would be on usability testing.

In case you really do create websites, we have a blog with some great tips on how to test websites.

Difference Between Testing, Quality Assurance, and Quality Control

Quality assurance (QA), quality control (QC), and testing are quality management activities quite often used interchangeably although there are differences between them. Let's try and figure out what these differences are and use the terms correctly.

Quality assurance refers to the processes established in a way to avoid defects and bugs and assure quality. So it is a preventive set of rules usually defined by senior members of teams and leads that are to be followed by all the team members working on a product (BAs, devs, designers, testers, managers, etc.).

Quality control, on the other hand, refers to the software engineering activities performed to detect all the defects that happened anyway despite quality assurance being set in place. These activities are performed before the product goes live and ends up in the hands of demanding users. QC usually includes code reviews, peer reviews, and the most important one - testing.

As already mentioned, testing is one of the QC activities that involves performing various kinds of tests, detecting bugs, and reporting them to the developers to fix them. Although it's the most important activity in QC, it's not the only one.

In order to deliver a high-quality product, companies need to achieve the right balance in establishing all these quality management activities. If QA processes are not set properly and obeyed, it would be very difficult and expensive to rely on testing and other QC techniques alone to insure the final product meets standards and is bug-free.

Types of Software Testing

Besides the main division of software testing into manual and automation testing, which is related to how the testing is done, another basic difference is made between functional and non-functional testing.

Functional testing refers to testing "what" software can do, its features, and all the different functionalities that it has according to functional requirements. On contrary, non-functional testing is focused on "how" the software does it, on the non-functional requirements specified. The most common types of non-functional testing are:

• performance testing (load, stress, endurance, and spike testing),

• security testing,

• usability testing,

• compatibility testing.

If you're curious to find out more than just this brief difference, our article on functional and non-functional testing is the right place to continue. 

There are three main testing methods:

1. Black box testing - the tester doesn't see the code, doesn't know what's inside the software, and is focused only on the inputs he provides, the outputs he gets, and whether they are as expected or not.

2. White box testing - involves testing the code itself, and its internal structure and is usually performed by the developers who wrote the code.

3. Grey box testing - as a combination of the previous two methods refers to testing both functional and structural parts of the software.

Depending on the level at which testing is done, it can be divided into:

• Component/Unit testing - refers to testing the smallest testable part of the system, a piece of the code that can perform a certain function. Unit tests are usually run in parallel to save time.

• Integration testing - aimed at testing if separate units are integrated properly and work well.

• System testing - software system is tested as a whole in order to check its compliance with the functional and technical requirements.

• User acceptance testing - this is the final testing stage when the software is tested against the end-user requirements and decided if it's ready for shipment or not.

Regression testing is a separate type of testing that involves testing complete software after some changes were implemented to check whether there were some negative consequences of the changes on already existing functions or system stability and performance. It is often automated in order to avoid manually performing all the same tests every time the software is updated. 

If you realize the importance of it just like we do, go check our blog post on regression testing and find out how to do it properly. 

Best Practices of Quality Assurance Testing

Apart from the main testing principles, every tester should be aware of, there are some good practices that might help you further improve your testing skills. Here are some of them:

1. Be aware of and analyze all types and methods of testing available so you can choose the ones that suit your current needs.

2. Clearly define what and how you're testing and test one thing at a time.

3. Use regression testing to make sure newly implemented features haven't negatively influenced already existing ones.

4. Bear in mind all the different devices, operating systems, and user profiles that your software might be used by.

5. Report bugs in a clear, concise, and precise way, easy to understand and reproduce.

6. Combine manual and automated testing whenever possible. If you're not quite sure how to do it, here you can find some great automation tips.

7. Document your testing activities and formulate comprehensive test cases and scenarios. Sound too demanding? Don't worry - just follow the tips and examples we provided on test case creation and you'll be ready to go. 

8. Consider Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) if you haven't already. The approach might help you speed up and improve the testing process. Not familiar with BDD? Learn about it here. 

9. Try implementing shift left testing. It can help detect bugs early in the SDLC and thus reduce the costs of fixing them. 

Software Testing Tools for QA

As the importance of testing and its quality is becoming more obvious, and wishing to improve and speed up the process at the same time, new software testing tools emerge very often. Selenium test automation framework is among the most popular ones. We've put a concise list of the pros and cons of Selenium for those of you who might be interested. 

EPAM has a number of automation tools that can bring numerous benefits to your testing team. You can get a glimpse at the most popular ones in a separate article we created or check each of them separately:

• EPAM Tools for Automated Testing

• Healenium, a self-healing test automation tool for web

• ReportPortal, test automation CI/CD report tool. If you've ever wondered why your automated tests fail, just hit the link and get some hints on how to find out. 

• Vividus, a scriptless test automation tool

• test IO, crowdsourced testing platform

In case you haven't found a tool you need in the list above, you might want to check a more comprehensive list of testing tools. One of them will definitely help you improve the testing process, its speed, and quality, as well as the overall quality of your products.