What is Quality Assurance?

Having a Quality Assurance team or professional is extremely important to ensure greater scalability and profitability for businesses.

In short, quality assurance is the term used to define the process of testing a new product, which aims to ensure that the quality and experience offered to the customer are in line with the quality standard intended by companies.

In this process, you must ensure that the consumer receives what was requested quickly, without any failure in execution or bugs throughout the entire shopping journey. This care makes it possible to deliver quality products that score well in customer satisfaction levels. And beyond that, the brand image can be directly affected in a positive way, consequently impacting the company's revenue.

In addition to testing, it is also necessary to create and apply systematic monitoring processes throughout the entire development phase of the product or service. These analyses will ensure not only the correction of bugs and operational or functional errors, but can also serve as insights for improving the experience offered.

Why is Quality Assurance important?

With the growth of the digital market, there has been more and more talk about the importance of customer experience for the growth and success of brands. To give you an idea, a survey conducted by ZenDesk found that more than 60% of customers prefer to buy from companies in a fully digital way, through simple and uncomplicated flows.

With the digital scenario increasingly heating up, purchase flows have become more and more optimized. Customers have become more demanding regarding the speed of purchase, and when they come across complicated or complex e-commerces or applications, they tend to give up and continue their search or purchase with a competitor. In the same survey, 50% of respondents stated that they switch to a competitor after the very first negative experience with a brand. When the bad experience repeats, this number rises to 80%.

In addition to customer experience, quality assurance also helps companies in several other ways, such as:

• Increased brand reliability in the market;
• Reduction of operational costs;
• Optimization of the IT professionals' work routine;
• Greater predictability for new projects;
• Improved brand image, boosting chances for new business;
• High customer satisfaction.

What does a Quality Assurance professional do?

The QA professional's role involves the identification of operational gains and corrections based on documentation and dialogue with other departments. It is important for them to rely on monitoring mechanisms to verify that all planned processes were executed throughout the project.

To understand this in practice, we have prepared a list of the main functions of a QA. Check it out:

Risk analysis

It is necessary to investigate in search of any problem that may occur during use.

Test data

During the development of the project, test data must be generated and maintained to assist throughout the entire process.

Tests

Various types of tests and success criteria can be carried out. The strategy must be defined in collaboration with the developers. Examples of tests: regression, refactoring, cross-functional requirements, and exploratory.

To conclude, it is important to highlight the difference between Quality Control and Quality Assurance. While quality control is focused on a set of actions and techniques for monitoring possible problems, Quality Assurance acts even before the product launch, working jointly with other departments for its production.