Why Does Your Business Need A QA Plan?

Quality is the prerequisite when it comes to software for business. Imagine you want a software for your business, and after months of the tedious development process, you got a buggy app! 

Not cool right? 

That is the reason you need a plan where you can test and fix issues of your web or mobile application before launch. To execute this, you need a quality assurance test plan which we are going to cover here in this post. 

Why your business needs a QA plan is the question we will address. You can also consider this post as QA plan 101, where I will brief you about the benefits of QA planning and how to create a test plan for software testing? 

So, without any further ado, let’s get you started. 

What is Quality Assurance Plan? 

A quality assurance plan is a document which will help your business to get bug-free software for your operations. This document is created by the team, which is handling our development projects. The next question to address is what content these documents contain. Allow us to answer that for you. 

The quality assurance plan document consists of activities that are meant to make sure that your end-user gets a quality product. When it comes to quality assurance process, there are four tenets that are paramount. These four tenets are Plan, execution, continuous testing, and continuous fixing. 

Did you notice that the first tenet of the agile-oriented quality assurance process is planning? 

Without a commendable QA Plan, there is no start to the QA process, and without a QA process, your business will spend more and more on the betterment the software because you never get the quality in the first place. 

Why Is A Test Plan Important? 

Either it is about achieving timely deliveries or cutting of the expenses made on resources required to build a product, a well-defined test plan brings you the wisdom to take on upcoming and existing challenges. In broader terms, it is more of a blueprint that simplifies the entire process of software testing while aligning you with the scope of the project.  

Besides, a test plan always brings you additional bandwidth that you need to accommodate any additional functionalities. A test plan brings you all the ease and ability to align with test objectives as you can have the overview of the entire progress made on project. Also, if you need to get ahead of the schedule while saving costs, it allows you to keep check of the process with improved mitigation strategies against redundancy.  

 Steps To Write Down A Perfect Test Plan 

Creating a test plan is not a tough job to foster. However, the only thing that you need to get right is understanding all the presets that are required to be considered for creating a software with perfect functionalities. There are six major steps that you need to follow or keep in mind when you need to have a perfect test plan in place. 

1. Product Analysis: In order to have an integrated test plan for your software product, it is vital to begin with in-depth testing of the product. This might need you to explore the features, functionalities, and all other user-specific details that can help create a great solution and offer maximum resistance to possible pain points. This step usually requires thorough analysis of the market environment so that any product developed could meet the business as well as competitive goals.  
2. Test Strategy Development: The next big step that you need to take for creating a perfect test plan is work on test strategy development. This step involves defining various testing practices that can help improve the functionality, usability, and overall performance goals of the product. Talking more specifically, defining the scope, the test types, risk assessment, etc. Are all important phases of test strategy development. 
3. Defining Objectives: This step is made to have a clarity of objectives related to a software project where key testing areas are established while defying any defects, issues. Also, this step helps the testers and DevOps teams to focus more on test planning and strategizing by extending effectiveness and overcoming any chances of redundancy. 
4. Plan The Team: Once you are done working on analysis, strategy development, and objectives, you can simply begin with assigning responsibilities. People, hardware, and software, this step is meant to take care of things that needs to be handled by specific personnel.  
5. Scheduling Things: When you have the right team in place, you can simply take on the idea of planning the work breakdown structure. This step requires you to break the tasks into time frames and finding the best way to align with deadlines.  
6. Document Test Deliverables: The process of creating test plan needs you to run through extensive small and major jobs. Thus, it becomes necessary to document all the information well so that future projects could be aligned for greater precision. Some of the few important documents that you need to create include test specifications, test plans, test scenarios, test designs, test logs, test data, test status, execution reports, release notes, etc.  

Checklist For a Perfect Test Plan    

Though creating a test plan for every new project is a different challenge, there are a few important factors that should never be missed while creating a perfect test plan. Some of the important factors that helps you prepare checklist for a quality assurance test plan includes: 

• Test Items 

• Features to be tested 

• Approach 

• Suspension Criteria 

• Deliverables & Tasks 

• Resource Requirements 

• Schedule & Staffing 

• Assumptions & Dependencies 

• Approvals 

Let’s talk about why and how QA planning objectives will help you in your business. 

Quality Objectives & Its Impact On Your Business 

When it comes to making a Quality Assurance Plan, you need to make sure that you are clear with the objectives. Six Sigma prefer to use a predefined algorithm which can help you in determining the quality objectives. To determine the quality objectives, your quality assurance plan needs to understand the problem statement of your customers. Without it, you cannot define a path on which you want to take your process to solve the issues of your customers. 

QA Is A Business Analysis Tool 

Without a proper QA plan, you risk your business to face unprecedented consequences. With a proper QA plan, you get better Intel. When you know what are the weaknesses, capabilities, and behaviors of your app, you as a stakeholder can easily make informed risk mitigation plan for your software’s current release. 
If you don’t value a plan, you are shipping bugs, and I can say that you’re doing it on purpose because you know that your app was not ready, but you released it anyway. 

Measuring QA For The Success Of Your Business 

This is another benefit which your business can miss if you don’t go for a QA plan. Quality goals are quantifiable and believe me; it is a challenging task without a plan. That makes QA planning even more important for your enterprise. Software quality is a subjective matter, and to identify tangible solutions, you must follow every step of your plan very carefully. 

Related Read: FinTech Industry And The Need Of QA

It Is All About Tying Your Business Goals With Your QA Strategies 

If you don’t invest sufficient time and energy in improving your quality assurance plan, your QA success will all go in vain. Resources here play a significant role. To push your QA plan to success, you need support (believe me, you cannot skip this part). 

Developing your company’s mindset towards strategic & intelligent quality decisions is simple when your Quality Assurance Planning is aligned with your business vision and goals. That is why we at BugRaptors, always focus on QA planning.  

Our trailblazing testers understand your business vision and goals. We first make sure that our testers align their mindset with your business goals and then craft a Quality Assurance Plan exclusive for your business to deliver only quality. 

Connect Today!