Quality Assurance

Focusing on quality in every step of the development process.

Ensure the Quality of Your Web Application

Customers want your web applications to be fast and attractive, but they expect them to work flawlessly. Web applications have become the most common way that customers interact with you and your company. While many customers will tolerate some slowness in an application, they have little tolerance for sites that crash or lose their data. Assuring that your applications meet this rigorous standard demands that quality is considered throughout the application's development, not just as a final check at the end of the project. Gathering accurate requirements, breaking business needs into technical tasks, and thoroughly testing the application are all essential to ensuring the web application attains this goal.

Why Develop with SitePen

At SitePen, we believe that quality is the single, most important aspect of any project we undertake. Our commitment to delivering bug-free solutions infuses every part of our development activities.

You will start to experience this as soon as you reach out to us. Our Sales and Project Management teams work with you to understand your goals and expectations, identifying the characteristics that have the most significant influence on the application's quality.

Our engineering team will then develop the solution with these goals in mind. They also create extensive suites of automated tests that ensure that the code continues to work as intended. Finally, we continuously monitor the project in search of refactoring opportunities to improve the code's structure as it evolves. While not usually considered an essential aspect of quality assurance, we have found that superior code organization often leads to exceptional quality in the final product.

As the application approaches completion, we will shift the project to examine the quality of the solution. During this phase, we conduct tests that exercise all aspects of the complete solution. We verify the business logic's correctness, ensure the code is performant and will not bog down under real-world workloads, and harden the application against the vast array of security threats that today's applications face.

Naturally, the final decision concerning the quality of the application resides with you. We will work with your infrastructure team to deploy the solution to a staging environment that allows you to conduct your own quality assurance verification. When all findings have been identified, we will resolve them, ensuring that you receive the most reliable and accurate application possible.

Software Quality Assurance Services

We utilize multiple testing strategies to verify the quality of our solutions.

Functionality Testing

Functionality testing is intended to guarantee that the application performs as intended. It focuses on the solution's correctness and is typically tested against the product requirements identified at the beginning of the project and refined during its development. Functionality testing generally is verified through a combination of automated tests, which codify the application's business rules, and manual testing by experienced quality assurance personnel.

Usability Testing

Many projects are functionally correct but end up as failures. These failures are often caused by poorly designed user-experiences that hamper adoption. Usability testing serves to verify the assumptions made during the design of the application's interfaces and interactions (i.e., its UX) by engaging real users to test and evaluate how well the application guides them through their workflows.

Performance Testing

Performance testing ensures that the application works quickly and efficiently to process user requests. The goal of this testing is not merely to blindly accelerate the application. Instead, performance testing focuses on the most common workflows, optimizing them to improve user efficiency and ensure that they can stay focused on the task at hand. Performance testing also extends beyond the single user to verify that the application can handle expected workloads without degrading the user experience and can scale as demands increase.

Security Testing

All applications have security concerns. While it is tempting to rely on the company firewall for internal business applications, almost every application has features that should only be accessed by a small group of qualified personnel. Security testing involves a comprehensive review of the application in its production environment. In addition to thoroughly probing the application for vulnerabilities, such testing often consists of verifying that the secondary systems, such as identity providers, are sufficiently hardened that they can't be used as an attack vector into the application.

Compatibility Testing

Users have an extensive set of applications and platforms that they can use to access today's web applications. Compatibility testing is the process of verifying the functionality, usability, performance, and security of an application for every option that users have.

Technologies We Use

SitePen has worked with all of the major quality control tools that support the development of today's web applications. Our engineering teams have developed deep expertise in the available technologies. They can readily assemble a suite of testing tools that support each project's quality requirements without overloading it with extraneous elements.

Selenium
Postman
Chai
Jasmine
Cypress
Mocha
Karma
Sinon

Enterprise Industry Expertise

Among SitePen's greatest strengths is its wide-ranging experience across multiple industries. We have worked with some of the largest names in multiple markets with each engagement serving to refine our ability to address each enterprise's individual needs.

Benefits of Enterprise Quality Assurance

One of the harsh realities of software development is that someone will find flaws in a software system. The goal and benefit of enterprise quality assurance are to ensure that the defects are found by the development and maintenance teams, not the customer. Each flaw or bug that makes it to the end-user erodes their confidence in the entire enterprise software ecosystem.

Choosing the Right Software Quality Assurance Company

The companies that provide the best software quality assurance services consider quality from the beginning of the project through to final delivery and launch. Best-in-class quality assurance processes look to identify each project's critical elements that serve as the key quality-drivers during the sales and requirements gathering phases. During development, engineering teams should craft the software using robust code organization patterns and a comprehensive set of automated tests to ensure that quality targets are achieved. As the project nears its conclusion, the application should be exposed to a battery of software quality control tools that confirm that the product is functional, performant, secure, and easy to use.

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Quality Assurance FAQs

What Is the Difference Between Quality Control and Quality Assurance?

Quality control encompasses tools and practices that are focused on identifying errors that exist in a system. This is a vital practice for any engineering project to adopt, but it is typically insufficient for many enterprise applications.

Quality assurance is a broader concept that takes advantage of any tool or practice to prevent defects from making it to the customer. Quality assurance processes integrate throughout the entire development project, including requirements gathering, development, and final quality checks.

What Is the Importance of Software Quality Assurance?

Software quality is directly tied to user confidence, so defects that consumers discover will decrease their satisfaction with, and willingness to use, the defective software. If the users are outside of the enterprise, customers will likely seek alternative solutions to defective software, often allowing competitors to gain market share. Within the enterprise, faulty software can trigger the creation of unofficial systems that attempt to meet the business need in a better way. These shadow systems are often poorly developed and maintained leading to quality, maintenance, reporting, and scaling issues.

What Are the Steps in Quality Assurance?

The steps involved in quality assurance are easy to identify - they are precisely the same steps as the product development process. QA is meant to consider quality throughout the project; it is not intended as another set of procedures that must be followed. There are four primary phases to a development project and, by extension, the QA process.

Requirements gathering

QA during the requirements gathering phases seeks to capture the key indicators that will drive the project's quality. Additionally, the requirements are conveyed to the testing team to start developing the manual and automated testing strategies that will verify that each requirement is met.

Development

During the development phase, the QA process tasks engineering teams with building quality into the code that they are writing. Engineering teams will often use code reviews, automated tests, and code refactoring to continually refine the codebase.

Testing and verification

As the project nears its conclusion, the testing team will apply quality control tools to identify any defects that the product contains. The development team will analyze and resolve each issue.

Delivery

The final phase in the QA process is delivery. During this phase, end-users have the opportunity to exercise their standard workflows in an isolated environment. Any defects found in this phase are then corrected by the engineering team and serve as a final check to ensure that the solution is as error free as possible.

What Are the Best Practices for Software Quality Assurance?

While the QA process's tools and specific practices vary widely, based on individual project requirements, some traits are universally present.

Quality assurance is most effective when multi-disciplinary teams are involved. When the team comprises project managers, developers, testers, business analysts, and actual users, the team can achieve a deeper understanding of what quality means for the project and how to achieve it.

Understanding which tools and practices are being used is also vital to any QA process. There are far too many tools available for any QA process to adopt them all. Instead, a subset of the available tools must be selected to form a lean but robust net that balances resource requirements with the ability to identify and eliminate defects.