The corner stone of an effective e-commerce operation – or for that matter any software related
operation, is efficient and precise testing and Quality Assurance.
When performed competently Quality Assurance can save your company its most precious commodity – reputation. As any successful business owner will tell you, reputation is the key to long term commercial relationships as well as repeat business. Guarding company reputation is amongst the most prudent business moves – and QA is your final defense.
Three Tips for improving the Quality Assurance process:
1. Clear client deliverables: The entire function of QA is to assure that the software meets client requirements. In order to assure efficient QA, the requirements of the project need to be as clearly defined as possible. The goal of QA is for the finished product to enter in to the client’s hands meeting all required expectations and ideally the product should be end user approved the first time.
2. Communication: Proper communication is essential for all aspects of a company to run efficiently, but it is most critical during QA. If there is not proper communication from software developers and project managers about what specifically needs to be tested and what the scope of the software is, there can be no assurance that QA will meet requirements the first time around.
3. Testing Scenarios: This cannot be emphasized enough; testing scenarios should be planned out in advance and should be made to incorporate as many possible scenarios of use as imagination and time will permit. If not done effectively, this will eventually lead to bugs in the software being discovered by the client, hurting company reputation.