Table of Contents
What do you think when your favourite app stops working? You think it must be a glitch, right? Well Quality assurance is a process of testing and correcting errors to prevent these glitches in any software or application.
Software quality assurance is an essential step to ensure a bug-free, cost-effective, top-notch user experience. Although an ongoing process, it is usually performed within the software development lifecycle.
As a rising skill, quality assurance is generating a high demand for skilled professionals in the field. The average yearly income for a software QA engineer in India is 5.0 Lakh, with salaries ranging from 2.4 Lakh to 11.5 Lakh. While these are some tempting figures, the profile also offers a progressive career.
Whether you are an IT professional or a fresher, you only need a deep understanding of quality assurance to get started on this profile. To make this easier for you, we have curated this blog to bring you all the information you need.
What is Quality Assurance?
In the software development lifecycle, quality assurance is a true testament to the software or the application. The software goes through a series of tests to ensure it has no bugs, errors, or glitches of any sort. Once the development is complete, the software is deployed for testing stages.
Here, the QA team is responsible for ensuring that the product meets the organization’s established and standardized quality specifications. However, the quality assurance process is ongoing as the software is constantly monitored to remove any bugs that may occur during the development phase itself.
All in all, the motive of quality assurance is to provide a seamless, uninterrupted user experience so that you can enjoy using the software or application without any annoying glitches.
And who performs this process? While there are various profiles relating to QA, the one that stands out is Quality Assurance Engineer.
Who is a Quality Assurance Engineer?
A Quality Assurance(QA) Engineer is a software development professional specialising in ensuring software application quality. They play a crucial role in the development lifecycle by identifying and reporting bugs, verifying functionalities meet requirements, and ultimately contributing to a seamless user experience.
The team of QA engineers in any organization is required to make and follow the software quality assurance plan. This plan defines the procedures and tools to complete the tasks included in the same document.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the SQA Plan to understand the functionalities of quality assurance.
What is the SQA Plan?
A document or list of deliverables for the QA team is basically the SQA Plan. It contains all the procedures, techniques, and tools employed in the SDLC. It serves as a roadmap to ensure the product or service is in harmony with the requirements outlined in the software requirement specification.
The team’s responsibilities, work products, and areas that require reviewing and auditing are also mentioned in the Software Quality Assurance Plan. Discussed below are the components of software quality assurance included in the SQA Plan.
Components of Software Quality Assurance
While various activities are performed to test the quality of any software, there are some essential elements. These are included in almost every SQAP as they are necessary to deliver high-quality, reliable, and compliant software.

Standards
Now, there are some software engineering standards devised by organizations that should be kept in mind during the development phase. The QA team needs to make sure that the development teams follow these standards.
Review & Audit
The quality assurance engineer reviews and audits the software technically to expose any errors. This is to confirm that the software is developed using the best practices and guidelines provided for the product.
Testing
The testing phase takes place to identify any bugs in the software. The QA is responsible for planning and conducting the testing procedure. This phase effectively conveys the process of identifying bugs in the software and sending them back to the development team for correction.
Analyzing Error
Analyzing is indeed an essential part of the quality assurance process as it provides a chance to prevent the bugs found during testing. It is the process of brainstorming possible methods needed to eliminate bugs and errors, so they don’t occur again.
Change Management
We can all agree that repeated changes are distracting in any SDLC. A change management strategy is implemented to overcome the challenge of confusion. This quality assurance method ensures that these changes do not affect the quality of the software.
Education
The QA team is responsible for sharing their knowledge and best practices with the rest of the organization. This improves the quality of production in each phase and reduces the chances of any glitches in the final product.
Vendor Management
A contract is maintained with the software vendors by the SQA team, highlighting that they accept quality practices during the development process.
Security Management
The security of any software is crucial in light of the crimes happening. In this quality assurance method, government-recognized policies are implemented to protect the data. It is the responsibility of SQA to verify whether the software organization is using appropriate technology to acquire software security.
Safety
To keep catastrophic events at bay, the SQA team regulates the evaluation of software, analyzes failure and devises the steps to avoid any risk in advance.
Risk Management
Quality assurance engineers also take responsibility for risk management. They ensure proper actions are conducted for risk management and a backup plan has been confirmed in case of failure.
Benefits of Software Quality Assurance
While the quality assurance process improves quality and reduces risks in the final product, there are various benefits it provides to the organization as well as the users. Here are some of the top benefits of Software Quality Assurance (SQA):
- Reduced Costs: SQA assists in identifying faults early in the development process, when they may be fixed much more affordably than after the product is released. Early detection prevents delays and expensive rework.
- Improved Software Quality: SQA finds and fixes faults and problems through thorough testing and analysis, producing a final product that is more dependable, stable, and user-friendly.
- Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: SQA helps to improve user experience by providing high-quality software, which lowers customer annoyance and raises satisfaction levels by focusing on usability, reliability, and functionality.
- Increased Security: Penetration testing is one of the SQA techniques that helps find and fix security flaws, safeguard user information, and avert security breaches.
- Faster Time to Market: SQA can actually speed up the process overall by eliminating bugs that might cause delays later in the development cycle, even though rigorous testing might appear time-consuming.
- Boosts Productivity: Reliable software with fewer faults reduces the amount of time developers and users must spend debugging and repairing problems, which boosts productivity overall.
- Reduced Risks: SQA proactively finds possible flaws before they become serious ones that could affect functionality or cause system failures, allowing developers to fix them.
- Protects Brand Reputation: Software that is unstable or glitchy can harm a company’s reputation. SQA contributes to a polished final product that enhances the brand.

Conclusion
To sum up, QA is the defender of software quality. It’s a thorough process that guarantees a seamless end-user experience and a high-quality finished product. QA specialists are essential to the success of any software project, from early bug identification and communication to rigorous testing throughout development.
You can better appreciate the endless efforts that go into creating the high-quality software programs that we depend on every day by learning about the Quality Assurance process and the knowledge of QA Engineers.
Gaining an understanding of QA is now easier than ever with the help of QA Training available online as well as offline. Hope this blog helped you understand the basics of quality assurance; good luck on your journey!
Join our newsletter: Get daily update on Salesforce career insights & news!
Join Now!