Speaker 1: Hey guys, this is Eric from Invensys, and I welcome you to our YouTube channel. In today's session, we will discuss Quality Assurance in detail. So do watch this video till the very end. Now, before we get started, I would like to address the agenda for today's session. We will start our session with a brief introduction to Quality Assurance. Then understand Quality Assurance methodology. Moving on, we will talk about some of the best practices for Quality Assurance and then discuss some methods used for Quality Assurance. Finally, we will conclude the session with the final topic which is Quality Assurance used by various industries. But before that, if you like this video, do subscribe to our YouTube channel. Also, to learn more about Project Management and its practices, check out Invensys Learning's Project Management Certification Training on PRINCE2, Project Management Fundamentals, PO, and MSB. All of the necessary information, CAPM, is given in the description box below. Now, starting with our first topic, what is Quality Assurance? Quality Assurance or QA is a method of preventing mistakes and defects in the manufactured products and assuring that there are no problems while delivering products or services to customers. Now, Quality Assurance refers to the administrative and procedural operations carried out in a quality system to ensure that a product's, services, or the activity's objectives and goals are met. Also, ensuring errors are prevented by systematic measurement, comparison to a standard, process monitoring, and a related feedback loop. The Quality Assurance component focuses on ensuring that quality criteria are met. On the other hand, quality control is concerned with the output of the process. Next, talking about the two principles of Quality Assurance. Fit for purpose, which means the product should fit the intended purpose, and right first time, which means eliminating all the mistakes, are two Quality Assurance principles. So now, the question here is, what does Quality Assurance include? Quality Assurance includes the management of the quality of raw materials, the different assemblies, products, and components, the services related to production, management, production, and inspection processes. So, the two ideas in building good products are. First, the engineer has to make it work once, while Quality Assurance's task is to make it work all of the time. Now, defining what a suitable product or service quality means has traditionally been a more difficult process. Consequently, it has been determined in a variety of ways. Firstly, ranging from the subjective user-based approach, which includes the various weights that an individual usually attaches to quality characteristics. Next, to the value-based approach, which finds consumers linking quality to price, and making overall quality conclusions based on such a relationship. Now, talking about the importance of Quality Assurance, it assists a company in developing goods and services that fulfill consumers' demands, expectations, and standards. It results in a high-quality product that earns customers' confidence and loyalty. In addition, a Quality Assurance program's rules and procedures assist in avoiding product faults before they occur. So this was just a brief introduction to Quality Assurance. Now, let us move on to our next topic and talk about Quality Assurance Methodology. Quality Assurance Methodology structured cycle known as the PDCA cycle, also often known as the Deming cycle. Now, the phases of this cycle are Plan, Do, Check, Act. These stages are done to guarantee that the organization's procedures are assessed and improved regularly. Let's look into the above QA process steps in detail. Plan. First, the organization should plan and create process-related objectives and the processes necessary to achieve a high-quality final result. Do. Second, process development and testing and then also doing modifications to processes. Next Check. Processes are monitored, modified, and checked to see if they achieve the intended goals. Then, Act. A Quality Assurance tester should take the steps necessary to enhance the procedures. So this was about Quality Assurance Methodology, now. So let us move on to our next topic and discuss the best practices for Quality Assurance. First is a proper plan. Now, you must plan every minute detail of your project if you truly want it to succeed, and you should also include software testing in the plan. Now, one of the most important Quality Assurance testing best practices is meticulous preparation. Prepare a test plan that details what will be tested, who will be testing it, what resources will be required for the testing, when the deadline will be met, what all the acceptance criteria will be, and next, what the current status will be. Also, be certain that all members of the QA team are aware of their roles, that they are invited to all important all-team meetings, and that they have access to all necessary resources. Testing schedules should coincide with project deadlines, and Quality Assurance professionals should fully understand project objectives. The second is any procedure that includes a group of people, needs accountability to succeed. You must develop precise and well-stated objectives and goals to attain the responsibility. Smart Quality Assurance goals and objectives can be implemented. Specified, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives are known as smart goals. They are specific, quantifiable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals. These objectives might be professional, that is, linked to software testing, or personal, that is unrelated to software testing but equally essential to the team. The third is, employ a multi-directional testing strategy. One of the most obvious but sometimes overlooked Quality Assurance techniques is to employ a variety of QA types. Don't limit your testing to just one or two categories of testing. You have to perform several testing methods to find various sorts of issues quickly. Encourage your developers to build automated unit tests to evaluate the quality of their code and correct any issues that come to light during the testing, and then send it to QA to be tested. After that, request the QA team to do the test and either confirm that the code is ready to be tested or return to the developers for retesting. The fourth is, conduct external quality reviews. Getting a second perspective is very beneficial in software development. You can invite an external specialist to analyze your product and provide a technical evaluation as a project manager, product owner, team lead, or business owner. They should include a basic summary and ideas for the team to consider to enhance their performance. While such a step is primarily intended for software developers, it will greatly aid QAs. After all, the goal of both developers and testers is to provide a high-quality product. However, the tone of this quality review should be taken into account. You must undoubtedly display the report to the team, but make sure it is written in a polite and constructive tone. The purpose of this evaluation is to motivate the team to improve their work habits, not to discourage them from collaborating with you. And the fifth is, maintain thorough documentation. All issues should be recorded and reported to ensure that the developers do not miss any issues. Documentation is also useful in later phases of the project. For example, if a previously detected and addressed issue reappears, this knowledge will enable developers to fix it faster this time because they will know what to do. Additionally, documentation helps testers demonstrate that they carry out their responsibilities thoroughly. However, high-quality documentation is more essential than mere documentation. If testers ambiguously report issues, developers and project managers will spend more time attempting to understand the problem rather than addressing it. Testers must use media files, such as screenshots or whatever best shows the fault to gain clarity. It may be simpler for a developer to spot the fault just by looking at the image than reading through a long, confusing description. Sixth is, maintain a healthy atmosphere within the team. This is the most obvious and neglected point among other quality assurance best practices. Fundamentally, a pleasant and healthy environment is essential for project success. Retrospectives are another crucial measure that can help you maintain team balance. Conduct weekly or monthly retrospectives and allow the team to express their issues. Avoiding this step leads to significant and unsolvable difficulties, so voicing concerns should be practiced as soon as they arise. Finally, remember to appreciate your team members for their good job. The seventh best practice is to notice even minor errors. Minor errors are still errors. While it may be simpler to dismiss minor issues, experienced developers do not do so. They realize that a small error might evolve into a major quality issue in the future. Until you study an issue, you don't know the specific causes behind it. Sometimes, the error might be an indication of something more serious. So when these errors appear, you can either repair the issue as quickly as possible or assign it to the technical debt. And, the eight best practices are to keep learning and improvising. The quality assurance area, like the rest of the IT business, is always developing. We all know that technology is evolving very quickly. The technology, techniques, and processes vary and change, so the information gained five years earlier may be of little use today. So, it is very important to keep learning and knowing about the latest technologies and processes. So these were some of the best practices for quality assurance. Now, let us move on to our next topic and talk about the different methods in which quality assurance is carried out. Quality assurance utilizes one of the following methods. Failure testing, statistical process control, total quality management, models, and standards. There are many other methods, but we will be primarily talking about these four methods in today's session. Now, let us talk about these methods one by one. First is failure testing, which is the process of repeatedly testing a product to see if it breaks or fails. This might include testing the product under heat, pressure, or vibration if it is a physical product that has to endure stress. Failure testing for software products may entail putting the software under high usage or load situations. The second is statistical process control, which is a methodology created by Walter Schuhart at Western Electric Company and Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1920s and 1930s. It is based on using statistical techniques to control a process or production method. This methodology can help monitor the process behavior, then discover any problems and issues in internal systems, and find the necessary solutions for production issues. Next is total quality management, which is a strategy of continuous improvement that uses quantitative approaches. Now, to assist product planning and performance assessments, total quality management depends on facts, data, and analysis. The quality of a product is determined by the quality of the elements that make it up, some of which are sustainable and well-controlled, while others are not. Total quality management is addressed by the processes handled using quality assurance. The product's quality cannot be guaranteed if the specification does not represent the genuine quality requirements. For example, the operating environment, safety, reliability, and maintainability specifications. Next are models and standards. ISO 17025 is an international standard that specifies the general testing and calibration competence standards. There are 15 technical criteria and 10 management needs. These requirements spell out what a laboratory must accomplish to be accredited. The management system refers to the framework of an organization's processes or activities for transforming resources into a product or service that fulfills the organization's goals, such as achieving consumer quality criteria, complying with regulations, or meeting environmental goals. Next, let us talk about software quality assurance. Software quality assurance is the process of methodically identifying trends and taking the steps necessary to enhance development processes. Identifying and correcting code errors that might have unforeseen repercussions. It is possible to repair one item while working on other features and functions simultaneously. SQA has become more crucial for developers to prevent problems before they occur, thereby saving time and money during development. However, even with SQA protocols in place, a software update might damage other features and result in defects, which are usually referred to as bugs. There have been a variety of SQA approaches. For example, Capability Maturity Model Integration or CMMI is a performance improvement-focused SQA model. CMMI ranks the maturity levels of various areas within a company and suggests possibilities for improvement. So these were some of the quality assurance methods. Now, let us move on to our next topic and talk about the quality assurance used by industries. First is the medical industry. In the medical profession, quality assurance is critical since it helps identify medical equipment and service standards. Hospitals and laboratories use external agencies to guarantee that equipment such as X-ray machines, diagnostic radiology, and ERB meet certain criteria. QA is especially useful during the development and launch of new medications and medical equipment. Through its members and regulatory organizations, the Research Quality Association supports and promotes the quality of research in the life sciences. Aerospace industry. Product assurance or PA is a phrase that is commonly used instead of quality assurance and is one of the three core project responsibilities, along with project management and engineering. Now, one aspect of product assurance is quality assurance. Product assurance is especially crucial since a single failure might have disastrous effects on human life, the environment, a gadget, or a mission. It has organizational, budgetary, and product development independence, which means it reports solely to the highest levels of management, has its own budget and does not use labor to assist in creating a product. Product assurance is on par with project management, except it emphasizes the customer's perspective. Software development or software testing. During the software engineering processes and procedures used to assure quality is referred to as software quality assurance. For this, many approaches or frameworks are used, such as guaranteeing adherence to one or more standards, such as ISO 25010, which replaces ISO-IEC 9126, or process models like CMMI or SPICE. Now, enterprise quality management software is also used to address challenges like supply chain disaggregation and assure regulatory compliance. Using contractors or consultants. When adopting new quality practices and processes, consultants and contractors usually use quality assurance, especially when the necessary skills, experience, and resources are not available inside the business. Now, for quality assurance, quality management systems, auditing, and procedural documentation writing are frequently used by consultants and contractors, as are CMMI, Six Sigma, Measurement Systems Analysis, Quality Function Deployment, Failure Mode, and Effects Analysis, and Advanced Product Quality Planning. So this was about the quality assurance used in different industries. And, with this, we have come to an end of this video. I hope it was helpful. Thank you.