What’s the biggest trend in cutting-edge business these days?
Failing.
Thought leaders are embracing failure like never before. The most successful people in the world give TED talks, write books, and attend entire conferences about their past failures.
It makes sense. After all, nobody makes it all the way on the very first try. Success isn’t about never failing, but about learning from your failures, so you don’t make the same mistake twice.
But there’s a catch.
Failure’s all well and good when you can contain the consequences. A failure early in product development is something you can learn from. A failure after you’ve shipped is a disaster.The only thing you can learn from that kind of failure is how to apply for a job. Preferably on a different continent.
So how do you avoid the kind of failure that’s more destructive than instructive?
With an ounce of prevention — also known as quality assurance.
In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about quality assurance with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud. Starting with how it’s not actually the same thing as quality control.
What does quality assurance mean?
Quality assurance is about building processes that eliminate problems before they arise.
It’s different from quality control, which is about seeking out problems and catching them before they escape containment. Both of them fall under the umbrella idea of quality management.
Quality assurance is the code of laws that require buildings to be fireproof. Quality control is the fire department.
Quality assurance is the quarantine. Quality control is the treatment.
You get the idea.
If you’re using a dashboard to track quality management — like this one from staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud — then you might have a lovely pie chart showing the number of defects caught by QA before products are shipped, and a bar chart monitoring the number of defects from customers.
Get started with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
How did quality assurance come about?
Quality assurance has a long history. In medieval Europe, the skilled professionals of a town would band together into guilds.
No member of the guild could sell goods that didn’t meet the guild’s quality threshold, and nobody could do business without joining the guild. A guild was the original QA team.
At the turn of the 20th century, manufacturing started to look more like it does today, with goods being mass-produced on assembly lines.
People like Frederick Winslow Taylor — arguably the world’s first quality assurance analyst — realized that mass production would never find customers if it couldn’t guarantee a consistent level of quality.
Taylor organized assembly lines around processes that prevented defective goods from being shipped.
Taylor’s work became vital to the success of the Allies in World War II. With the United States on a total war footing, practically every factory in the nation was churning out supplies for the military.
Without quality assurance standards, producing in such a huge volume could have resulted in 1,000s of defective products rolling off the conveyor belts — and costing lives.
The basic principle of quality assurance is that no product should reach the customer without passing through a process designed to catch any major defects.
Instead of merely fixing problems where they appear, businesses should look for problems where they don’t immediately see any.
After all, as anyone who’s ever walked around all day with their fly open knows, it’s hard to see some issues unless you’re looking for them.
Since taking its modern form in the early 1900s, quality assurance has been adapted to fit every industry imaginable.
Hospitals conduct regular inspections of their patient care procedures, looking for anything that might be making symptoms worse.
Mass manufacturers test a random sample of products every day, on alert for any statistical variations that might indicate something wrong with the machines.
And then there’s software, where a trained quality assurance analyst must adapt testing procedures to each new product their teams build.
Even for a quality assurance specialist, remembering each quality process can get complicated. Fortunately, technology has risen to the challenge.
What you see above is the staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud process management template, a customizable dashboard you can use to keep track of every step of a complex quality process.
Keep staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud in mind as you read the rest of this article — it’s adaptable to all the major quality assurance methods, and more besides.
What are quality assurance methods?
1. ISO
One of the most common methods of quality assurance is to make sure everything you do conforms to a trustworthy quality standard.
It’s best if you don’t come up with the quality standard yourself. If you write your own quality assurance metrics, the public will always be a little suspicious that you tweaked them for your own benefit.
Instead, work with an external organization that guarantees quality — like the guilds of old.
ISO, or the International Standards Organization, is the best-known body of quality assurance experts.
Their current universal quality assurance standard, known as ISO 9001, is based on 7 principles of quality. ISO auditors visit companies and dig deep to see if the 7 principles are being followed.
If a company passes, it gets an ISO 9001 certification, which is sort of the corporate equivalent of a restaurant getting an A from the health department.
There are also more technical certifications like ISO 17025, which determines whether a manufacturer’s calibration tests are accurate.
ISO certification isn’t just a formality. There’s evidence that it improves a company’s financial performance.
A user-friendly due diligence template, like the one above from staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, is a great way to prepare for an ISO or any other type of audit.
2. Statistical process control
Statistical process control (SPC) is a QA program that uses measurable variables as proxies for overall quality.
If any of your measured values goes outside a certain range, act immediately to fix the root cause of that variation.
It’s like in a sci-fi movie when the engineer character says, “readings are off the scale!”
In statistical process control, your job is to get those readings right back onto the scale, pronto.
SPC happens in 3 steps. First, build a procedure for conducting regular statistical measurements.
The variables you’re measuring will be different in every industry. It could be anything from the evenness of paint sprayed on a car door to the lag time of a cloud-based application.
Since no 2 companies will use quite the same variables, a staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud template — like the one above for bug tracking — will come in handy.
You can add your own custom columns for measurements that only make sense for your project, and view the data in the way your team prefers.
The second step in SPC is to run your procedure like clockwork, as often as possible. Software testing can involve SPC quality assurance processes multiple times a day.
Finally, correct any variations that can’t be explained by natural phenomena.
No hardware, software, or human being is perfect 100% of the time. Fluctuations happen.
It’s only when they’re outside a certain limit — and you don’t know why — that you need to step in.
If you’re lucky, your quality assurance process catches a defect before it develops into a major problem.
3. Stress-testing
Stress testing is just what it sounds like.
You take your product and make it suffer every kind of pain imaginable.
In hardware testing, this means putting the product through all sorts of unfriendly environmental conditions. Extreme heat, freezing cold, electric shocks, sudden impacts — the sky’s the limit.
(Not literally — you don’t have to launch the product into space for stress-testing. But it wouldn’t be that weird if someone did.)
In software testing, it means making every possible mistake an end-user might make.
Video game testers, for example, spend the whole day running game avatars into walls, searching for one that wasn’t programmed right.
Stress-testing is a key step in quality assurance. Developers conduct it even when the stressor seems totally implausible.
Remember that quality assurance is all about seeing problems that haven’t happened yet. And that takes some imagination.
What’s the role of quality assurance?
Imagine a company that’s building the world’s greatest helpdesk software.
It’s a week before launch, and everything is going well. They’re just waiting for the latest tests from the QA engineer, and then there’ll be nothing left but marketing.
Then your staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud dashboard updates automatically with data from one of the final QA tests. It shows that lag time on the chatbot is far longer than average.
The quality control team digs in and discovers that some unnecessary code from the prototype was never removed, and it’s slowing down the whole platform.
Without regular QA testing, they would have released a substandard product. Quality assurance via staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud saved the helpdesk’s software quality, and the launch was a smashing success.
Quality assurance allows you to get ahead of the issue
A quality assurance program is about the prevention, not the cure. In QA, you create processes to prevent small problems from growing into large ones. That means you need a quality assurance system in place before the first bug arises.
Using staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud makes it incredibly easy to track and respond to issues in real-time, saving you from an embarrassing launch. Explore our user-friendly templates today.
Get started