Should you have a QA/BA in your development team?

Quality Assurance is the most important certificate of each application before launching. The QA result will be evidence to show that the app is quality enough to be used by end-users. However, having a Quality Assurance or business analyst specialist in your developer team is really necessary? What exactly a QA/BA do? And are they required for your success? Let’s check the answer in the blog below.

I. What does QA/BA do?

Quality Assurance’s main role is making sure the quality of a launching product meets the required standard. Their job is not only finding the bugs but also predict the potential risks that an app can cause to make sure the quality of the development process. 

Specifically, a QA identifies all the bugs and potential risks of a product during the whole producing process, matches the business owner’s requirements with the completed application, and tests the software in the software development lifecycle. 

The worth outsourcing software development packages should include the high-standard testing process. Therefore, testers are between the end-users and the software development team, whose responsibility is making sure the product is in the best condition before launching. 

II. When do you need QA/BA?

As being mentioned, QA/BA collect the owners’ requirements and work with developers to transfer the idea to reality; also they testing the application in the whole process to make sure the final application meet the standard quality. It can be seen that the software development team need a QA from the starting point of any software development projects. 

The whole testing life cycle will start from Requirement Gathering, Testing the plan, Testing Development, Testing Execution, and Testing the Report.  All parts of the cycle, as you see, play an important role in the result of the final application. Having a QA/ BA in your project team can save you from a lot of risks to secure your business, save money during the development process, protect your reputation after launching an app, make sure the product quality and better monitor the whole developing process. 

Also read: Best Practices for Managing a Remote Development Team in 2024

III. Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) 

When hearing the role and responsibility of Quality Assurance, you may feel it is similar to Quality Control. But it is not the same one, the QC process focuses on the final products and uses all testing method to make sure the product in the good quality and meet standard requirements. While a QA identifies defects in the developed products, from the starting point to the end, before the software application release. So the definition of QC is included in QA definition. However, in some cases, if an application needs to be tested by another group after it is developed, only QC is required to check if the software application meets requirements or not.

IV. Advantages when having a BA in your team?

As you know the role and necessity of a QA/BA in your software development team, now we will discuss the advantages of having a QA/BA in your team. 

1. Coordinator of a project

As the discussion above, the QA/BA is the one who stays between investors and developers, they will know exactly the business owner’s requirements. Therefore, they will know exactly the investor’s requirements and can quickly answer developers’ questions about the design, functions, as well as update the status of the total projects. They play the main role in keeping the software development process follow the pipeline and constantly up to date. 

2. Testing for more understanding

Testing is the necessary step in the whole process before the final launching. While you have a BA/QA in your team, all the developers will pay attention right from the beginning to avoid the potential risks and bugs even in the UAT phase.

As someone has deep knowledge about the whole process and software products, he/she can be more accurate to test the software application and predict the potential risks of a software application. 

3. Earlier and valuable decision

To clearly understand the product owner’s idea, a list of questions should be raised by not only developers but also the Quality Assurance and Business Analyst. The more valuable questions are raised, the more information a QA/BA get to minimize the gap between idea owner and developers, QA and BA. Based on these answers and reality a business analyst can predict and minimize the risks. Sometimes, the risks may not occur in the UAT because they are predicted from the starting point of the project. 

4. Satisfied developers

It is always a kind of happiness when seeing our product be successfully launched and be welcome by end-users. That is why all the developers will try their best to complete their tasks before launching the software application. If end users find any bugs happening during using the app and report it to the application owner, the developer may spend their time to fix that bug to make sure everything works well and satisfies end-users. Having a QA/BA in your team can help developers feel more confident and enjoy their coding life, essentially after the app is launched. 

5. Non-technical perspective

It can be seen that without any idea of technical, testers can consider the developer team as a normal customer and analyze. As in a UAT, they can feel free to test and give the comments to improve the software quality, present as an end-user, no need technical perspectives, then they can raise the more innovative idea to help the software idea become nearer to end-users. 

These above advantages show the importance of quality assurance and business analyst in an experienced software development team, both outsource and in-house team. They can fulfil all the missing pieces during the application development process. 

As a high-skilled software development company in Vietnam, Adamo Software will bring you the best outsourcing experience ever. Feel free to contact us and get consulting to your project.