Quality, just like any other measure, requires a frame of reference or standards for us to compare against customer needs. These standards can help us to maintain and promote the consistency of the products developed, minimize the amount of rework required, and produce a customer-oriented product.

Quality can be defined in different ways. According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 13628-2:2006, quality can be defined as conformance to specified requirements.

There are seven main ISO principles (by ISO 9000) that revolve around making a good quality product:

• Customer focus
• Leadership
• Engagement of people
• Process approach
• Improvement
• Evidence-based decision-making
• Relationship management

The quality model presented by ISO (ISO/IEC 25010:2011) is useful to assess the quality of products. Adoption of this model ...

Quality assurance is the key to the success of any business. The software development process goes through various phases, and ensuring quality at every step is a must. In the previous section, we saw why it's important to deliver a quality product. In this section, we'll learn how we can deliver quality products.

Delivering a project with a defined scope within a specified amount of time, with a set budget, and with certain quality standards expected by the customer are key factors in making a project successful. However, reaching a reasonable trade-off between these factors is necessary to get to market quickly and to remain competitive.

For example, if the scope of the project increases while the resources and time remain the same, it will affect quality directly, since the team to remain to deliver more within the stipulated time frame....

Software products are the result of a multidisciplinary team coming together to make a concrete product that serves customer needs. Although the team is formed of several roles, such as managers, analysts, developers, and testers, each role is essential to deliver a suitable and robust product. This requires each of these contributors to be a part of the quality process.

If every role has a part in ensuring quality, why do we need a separate role for testers? One simple reason is to introduce a fresh set of eyes. While it is possible for a developer to test their own code or software, it requires a different mindset to ensure quality. A developer's mindset is to prove that their software works, but a tester's mindset is to make the product fail to work. Thus, the tester's role is more about finding defects in the software.

Now...

As we have seen so far, there are various ways we can ensure quality in our projects, but how do we evaluate whether the quality system we pick is effective? This becomes more of a concern if one organization needs to contract its work to another and needs to know whether the contractor will be able to provide quality services and products. This need for the quality system to be auditable necessitates the use of a Quality Management System (QMS).

A QMS is a set of standards that defines how an organization can meet the requirements of its customers and other stakeholders. Quality standards are a set of guidelines, rather than actual standards, that have been widely accepted in the software industry with defined processes and evaluation metrics to help improve the quality of software. The motivation for the selection of a standard is left to...

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a process to develop and deliver software products or services that details the end-to-end phase, from designing, coding, and testing, to maintaining the product after release. The Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) is a subset of the SDLC. Let's explore both the SDLC and STLC in detail.

The SDLC is a planned and organized process that divides software development tasks into various phases. These phases help the team to build a product that adheres to the factors of scope, time, cost, and quality. It also helps the project manager to monitor and control project activities at each stage and perform...

To ensure the quality of the product, we need to understand our application and its testing needs to make it more robust and bug-free. Based on the customer requirements and the type of product we are developing, we can come up with a list of the types of testing that are needed during the test planning phase of STLC.

In this section, we will be learning about the different testing types that can be used during the test-execution phase:

• Black-box testing: Pays attention to external behavior, specifications, and desirable end results produced by the application by passing a set of known input parameters rather than the internal structure of the code. The main goal here is to verify the software in the way the end user will test or use it without having knowledge of the internal workings of the system under test. Black box testing helps testers to identify...

In software testing, verifying test scenarios with valid or invalid parameters, and different sets of input values is crucial to make sure that it behaves as per the designed test. In order to validate end-to-end scenarios and happy path workflows, we need to create test data. However, sometimes, it's a requirement of the test to bring the system to the initial level from where testing can begin. All these things can be done as a part of the test data preparation phase.

Depending on system requirements, testers can create different sets of authorized and unauthorized users with different roles, such as admin, or customer support executive, all of whom have different sets of permissions to access the application. Creating a concurrent set of users to access the application is also part of test data preparation.

Testers may...

In this chapter, we discussed software quality assurance in detail. Let's summarize the important points—a quality product refers to products that meet customer requirements. The ISO/IEC 25010:2011 quality model enumerates 13 characteristics that help us to assess the quality of products. Producing quality products requires a combination of complementary skills and roles as part of the product-development team. Scope, time, cost, and quality are intertwined, and hence a balance between them is essential when developing a product that caters to an organization's capabilities as well as customer satisfaction. A test-to-break attitude is necessary for a tester to be successful in their career. We looked at the thought process a tester needs to bring to the table to be proficient at the job. A quality management system addresses the processes...