Ethics of Quality Assurance Tech Companies Need to Follow

In the hustle-bustle of fulfilling business requirements where speed is important for companies, it’s easy to forget the critical trait that is ethics. If companies place speed at the top and ethics at the bottom, then their business might soon start damaging its reputation.

Ethics in this case refers to the moral principles that govern a company's behavior or the conducting of an activity. It is vital to follow proper ethics and deliver unparalleled results when it comes to quality assurance and software testing for tech companies.

Why Tech Companies Need to Build an Ethical Business Culture

Most companies develop software for profit or earning money, not for social service. As such, it’s necessary that companies ensure their quality promise will never be broken or compromised.

Quality is the key to satisfying your buyers and clients. If tech companies fail to assure quality of their products, then who really is willing to get what they are offering?

Quality Assurance Is Part of Good Ethics

Quality assurance in software development is the process that assures all software engineering methods, procedures, activities, and work at the bare minimum comply with the established standards. These established standards or guidelines could be a combination of one or more norms, such as the CMMI model, ISO 9000, ISO15504, and so on.

Software quality assurance (SQA) covers all phases of software development. It starts with defining requirements, preparing codes, and ends with a final release.

SQA focuses on improving software development processes and makes it useful based on the quality standards defined for software products. Its objective is to ensure quality and fulfill the unique needs of the organization.

So, how do you go about the processes of quality assurance and in so doing remain within the expected ethical confines as a tech company?

Best Ways to Be Ethical and Assure Quality

#1. SQA Planning

An hour of planning can save three hours of execution. Building ethics into a business strategy via the planning process is a vital step in ethics management. The plan sets the basis for how an organization's activities will carry out. It is crucial to include ethics into strategic planning to ensure that every aspect of the company is aligned with the broader ethos and values.

In the software quality assurance (SQA), planning consists of techniques, procedures, and tools used to assure that the product or service meets the requirements set out in the software requirement specification (SRS).

The SQA plan defines the team roles for SQA, outlines the areas that require evaluation and auditing. It also identifies the functions that work while ensuring the quality assurance of software products. 

The software quality assurance plan includes the following sections:

• Goal section.
• Reference Section.
• Tools, methodologies, and technologies section.
• Software configuration management section.
• Problem reporting.
• Corrective action section.
• Code control section.
• Records collection and maintenance section.
• Testing methodologies.

Organizations should plan and set process-related targets, including defining the processes needed to produce a high-end quality product.

#2. SQA Plan Management Creation

In this activity, you must decide how the plan works or how the software quality assurance will take place in your project. It also includes the SQA approach that you follow for the entire testing.

You need to carry out some engineering activities to ensure to your client that you have a dedicated and the right talent mix in your team.

#3. Setting the Schedule

The SQA team creates various checkpoints to evaluate the effectiveness of each stage of project activities.

The proper schedule is necessary to assure and reassure the customer that you take care of their valuable time and of quality.

#4. Use Software Engineering Techniques

You should apply software engineering techniques from designing to development and testing, especially if you want to help your customers gain high-quality customer satisfaction.

After all, quality assurance is all about the activities set out to assure that the project meets stakeholders' expectations.

For this phase, you can collect information from various sources like tutorials and videos. You can use functional analysis system techniques to get the project estimation and source line of codes.

#5. Formal Technical Reviews Execution

The goal of FTR (Formal Technical Reviews) is to evaluate the prototype's design and quality. During this phase, you can conduct a meeting with the technical staff to discuss the actual quality requirements of the software with the prototyping of design quality.

By doing such activities, you can easily detect errors in the initial software development life cycle (SDLC). It helps reduce rework efforts for later stages.

#6. Multi-Testing Strategy Adoption

Every business has unique requirements and goals to achieve success. So, you can adopt multiple-testing strategies for different project guidelines.

There are several types of software testing services like manual testing, automation testing, usability testing, and performance testing design to fulfill the particular business needs and quality assurance.

But it doesn’t mean you can run all of them for each project due to the different types of testing for different purposes. Thus, you should never rely on a single testing approach.

Always have a multiple-testing strategy to ensure better quality and the fulfillment of the specific product requirement.

#7. Implementing Process Adherence

This process focuses on the need for process adherence throughout the SDLC (software development life cycle) process.

The development process should also commit to following the specified procedures. Process adherence implementation procedure can be done in two ways.

One is through product evaluation in which you can analyze whether the requirements are met as per the project management plan. It also helps to understand that the set of standards for any project is followed accurately.

Another way is process monitoring, where you verify and track whether the correct steps are taken during software development.

#8. Regulatory Changes

The activity can be completed using a mixture of manual procedures and automated tools. It helps you validate the change requests and evaluate the behavior of changes.

Based on the evaluation, you can control the change effect to ensure that the software quality is maintained throughout the development and maintenance phases.

#9. Defect Reporting

In this activity, the QA team reports the defect found in the software and fixes it. After that, they determine the impact of the change caused by the fixing of defects.

They QA team can perform testing if the change has fixed the flaw and even ensure the whole project's consistency.

For accurate bug reporting, managers, developers, and testers can use software quality metrics to monitor the changes and activities from the beginning to the end of SDLC.  

#10. Performance Auditing

The reason to audit the SQA process is to make sure the entire SDLC process is followed. It measures whatever reported by the QA team in the status reports is performed well or not.

It is also beneficial for exposing non-compliance issues.

#11. Records Maintenance and Reports Generation

The necessary documentation should be maintenance related to SQA and share it with the stakeholders. It helps them to understand what you have done to improve their product quality.

From audit results, test results, change requests documentation to review reports, everything should be recorded for future reference.

#12. Respect Relationship

QA and the development team should maintain good relations with each other. If tech companies do not make their good bond with employees, it can affect the overall project quality.

#13. Must-know SQA Elements

Here are the essential elements for software quality assurance that you need to remember.

• Software engineering standards.
• Technical audits and reviewing.
• Software testing for quality management.
• Error detection and analysis.
• Change management.
• Vendor management.
• Security management.
• Training/educational programs.
• Security management.
• Risk management.

#14. Follow-up SQA Techniques

Various techniques apply for software quality assurance in which auditing plays a chief role. However, we provide other relatable methods as well.

• Auditing
• Reviewing.
• Code Inspection.
• Design Inspection.
• Real-life simulation.
• Functional Testing.
• Standardization.
• Static Analysis.
• Peer reviewing or walkthroughs.
• Stress testing.
• Path testing.
• Six Sigma.

In Conclusion

Software quality assurance is an activity that you can consider throughout the software development life cycle. Without quality assurance of software, it would be challenging for you to make the product competitive.

As you can now tell, there are several standards, activities, tools, and techniques that you need to follow as ethics protocol that will help you provide the desired quality to customer's software.

All the best in providing quality assurance and building proper work ethics!