Quality Assurance: How do you automate a QA process?

Whether you are selling any products or providing digital services to the customers, they expect a consistent quality every time they use your product or services. This is possible with an effective quality assurance (QA) process for all systems and processes related to providing your services. Automating the QA process helps you minimise the expense and time you spend on evaluating and improvising your services. The automation process also enhances employee productivity and performance.

What is QA Automation?

QA automation refines the process of creating deliverables and enhances their efficiency using automation rather than depending on manual input.

Implementing QA means searching areas needing improvement, enacting updates, and planning assessments.

Before delivering the final product to the customer, the software testing team has to enforce strict testing that keeps the system free from bugs. Leveraging automation minimises the potential risks of manual errors when quality assurance is done.

Automating a quality assurance process also helps mitigate the software’s repair cost.

QA automation is the automatic QA process performed by specific software testing tools under the guidance of a QA specialist.

How to automate a QA Process- Easy steps

QA automation depends on building quality tests with no-code software. Once you set these tests in the QA tools, the test automatically runs and shows the results.

It takes just accurate software to start with the basics of automating the QA process.

QA isn’t a one-step process. In the same way, effective automation of QA processes needs proper planning, execution, & refinement. By implementing the following steps, your QA team can develop and leverage the benefits of QA automation.

Defining Scope

Before beginning with QA automation, you have to understand how many tests and projects you are planning to run in automation. This process will decide the complexity and size of the automation tool that you will need.

Picking a suitable QA automation tool

Once you define your project scope and requirements, you need to precisely pick the correct tool for fulfilling your specific goals.

Making a strategy

You need to plan regarding ‘when, who, and how’ of the automation process. If you run the tool nonstop on different projects it will reduce the results and will feel like a burden. Knowing the right timing and use will be the right way to victory.

Execute the plan

With a decided plan and accurate automation tool, you are free to begin automation. Start with small and develop the way to complex procedures to know how the tool works in your business.

Evaluate the process

After you run the test, do not forget to evaluate the tool’s performance, accuracy, and quality. If you are not receiving the anticipated results, try modifying the tests and creating other options if necessary.

If the results are up to the mark, evaluate the product quality and see if any new problems are discovered.

Form a Report

Make a report for your team on the potential parts of the project that need improvement, and ask them to make new strategies for addressing them. By staying transparent in the report, your team can decide what is important to amend in the new strategy and work productively on that issue.

Improving the weak areas of the project

Based on the results, you should fill the gaps in your process to develop efficient tests for future QA checks.

Keenly observe the results.

After implementing improvements, you should note how these improvements can change your results. With these observations, you will know whether to carry on with those improvements or enlarge the tests to other areas too.

Be consistent with the cycle

It is the final step of the QA automation cycle. The abovementioned steps are essential to follow, and you can repeat them whenever needed to minimise manual QA work.

The initial investment in QA automation can save your team significant time. The right process and strategy are important to optimise the QA automation and understand which test will work and when.

Advantages of QA automation

When implementing automated Quality Assurance, you get different benefits for your company. Here are some of them:

• Improved productivity of the employees: Automating QA saves employees from performing complex tests like design and development.
• Auditing trails for activities- Automation of testing provides access to each department to test the data of the next steps.
• Less training time needed- Automating the QA allows you to train the employees on essential processes in a shorter period.
• Adherence management- QA automation will automatically follow adherence rules and give you peace of mind.
• Better return on investment (ROI)- by decreasing the testing time, automation QA pays well even on a small or limited budget.
• Oversight of the team- As the QA process is now automated, leaders can easily focus on team and project management tasks.
• Rich information- The automation process integrates information from different sources.

For improvement of workflows and maintaining quality, automate the repetitive processes that need hefty manual work. Also, search for the areas where the human error risk is high, this will make QA automation easier.

Manual vs Automated QA process- What’s the difference?

Before you switch to automated QA, here are some points that will help you differentiate it from the manual QA process;

Manual QA process

• It consumes resources and time more than an automated process
• Chances of human errors increase in this type of QA process
• This method needs a lesser initial investment
• It delivers lesser ROI as compared to the automated QA process
• The range of manual QA depends on the skillset of your testing team

Automated QA process

• This process is faster and needs no labour
• It is highly accurate and regulated
• The automated QA process has a bigger initial investment
• But it also delivers more ROI in return
• Automated QA performs pre-written tests and runs the tests made in plain English.

These are some of the primary differences between manual and automated QA testing.

Some challenges of the Automation QA process

Here are some challenges that one faces while switching over to automation QA process:

• Dependent on human written tests- This new process may depend too much on humans for setting up, monitoring, and refining the inputs and outputs.
• Employee training- Companies have to teach their employees how to use the automation tool. It takes resources, time, and patience to learn new technologies.
• High entry-level expense- QA automation tools will need an essential upfront investment, even if they pay for themselves over time.
• More reliance on automation- Even though automation is necessary, if the team relies heavily on automation, the quality of the project may degrade.
• Less collaboration- When you are introducing automation, it is vital to emphasise teamwork. During automation, some employees might feel that they are ignored and no longer needed. This can split their trust in the team and can develop collaboration issues.
• Difficulty in selecting the right tool- There are various tools available in the market that make it difficult for the team to choose any one from them.

These are some of the drawbacks of quality assurance automation. We hope that you have learned something new about QA from this article.

Final Verdict

The steps we saw in the above article are primary and almost necessary to follow while trying to automate the QA process. QA automation can be useful as well as can be a burden in certain cases. Try to be clear about your requirements before choosing automation over manual processes.

Find out how to improve your manufacturing outputs, drive positive change within your operations and grow your business with IoSCM. Call 0800 1422 522 today to find out how we can help.