What are the benefits of optimized QA testing?
An optimized QA team and testing effort reduce costs, speed up projects and continuously improve product quality. Project schedule risks and budget overruns associated with software development are also lowered. Realizing these benefits can often turn parity into competitive advantage and loss into profit.

What differentiates quality assurance from testing?
Testing is conducted to find defects and verify product functionality. QA starts earlier focusing on quality planning, process improvement and integration of customer feedback. QA spans the entire software development lifecycle determining how quality will be built into software products, measured and managed going forward. In summary, QA is the systematic approach necessary to ensure overall software requirements will be met in a predictable, cost-effective manner.

Does QA require more up front investment?
Implementing quality assurance typically requires some additional investment early on. However, once QA best practices are in place, backend testing costs and in-field product issues are reduced, thus decreasing overall cost significantly.

We already have a QA team. How would Nails QA be able to help us?
Nails QA can work alongside your existing QA team to improve results by providing additional QA leadership, training, metrics, automation, tools, infrastructure development and on demand testing resources along with other supplemental QA engineering services.

What are some typical QA techniques and best practices?
Software Inspection - Inspecting software requirements, design and code is perhaps the most effective way to find defects early. Identifying root causes of problems, reducing defect injection and early project team engagement are other benefits of software inspection.

QA Planning - Determines what is required to ensure all software quality requirements will be met on time and within budget. QA planning also defines test strategies and how resources will be utilized.

Test Automation - Systems that automatically run product functionality and report inconsistencies to reduce repetitive testing tasks and standardize results. Automation systems are also used to verify functionality after product changes occur.

Defect Tracking and Metrics - Tracking defects and reviewing metrics ensures efficient processing of software issues and promotes well-informed decision making. Analyzing defect trends and source code changes provides critical insight to determine whether projects are on track or need adjustment.