Risk Management in QA Teams: A Detailed Overview

From IT development to Quality Assurance, management is a highly significant concept for all trades. More importantly, when management is all about defining procedures and guidelines that can help ensure success with the deliveries, risk management becomes crucial to pursue.

Since every development activity made in the context of digital transformation is meant to drive some high output products, risk management makes it easy to cut all the risks involved. The process might even involve planning mechanisms that can help with risk assessment and early risk prevention.

A standard step-by-step risk management model works on the general agenda of risk analysis and prevention. The process usually involves:

• Risk identification
• Risk analysis
• Subsequent risk assessment
• Fixing the uncertainties

If pursued in the right manner, risk management not only helps QA teams to prevent any negative outcomes from the QA process but even helps to streamline the entire development lifecycle.

However, working on such a risk management plan needs QA teams to foster quality communication with the stakeholders to avoid risks long before they are likely to arise.

Also, there are several sets of risks that are generally faced during the development phase that must be identified and resolved at the earliest to ensure optimum results.

In this blog, we will aim to highlight the importance of QA as an aspect of digital transformation. Also, we will aim to underline what are actually risks in software testing and how the entire process of risk management works. Let’s begin.

Importance Of Quality Assurance: An Aspect of digital transformation

Since we all are informed of the fact that technology is the essence of digital transformation initiatives, getting onto the market with faulty software or applications could cause a major loss of time and money.

More importantly, launching a product that lacks quality could cause a loss of brand value or maybe loss of operations due to poor functionality and performance outcomes. Quality Assurance as in risk-based testing helps to identify all the potential bugs and get over the issues that might affect the future of the organizations as well as users.

Risk & Software Testing: A Detailed Understanding

When we talk about software, there is no particular definition bound to it. It can come from any context or peculiarities of the product requirements leading to expected or probable loss. Therefore, risk in software testing can have different definitions based on the assessment and measurement of loss.

A quick definition of risk in software testing can be the probability plus consequences of an adverse event, which can be financial setbacks, productivity loss, or overall functionality issues. Therefore, it becomes extremely important to work on timely risk assessment while exploring answers to risk-related queries. These may include:

• What can be the negatives?

• How can they happen?

• What can be the consequences?

• What is the probability of a negative outcome?

• What can help reduce such risks?

• Is there an acceptable risk?

  
  

What Is Risk Management?

Risk management is more of a process than just a definition. Therefore, it would be easier to pursue risks in consideration of the factors that must be kept in mind to foster risk management practices. Here is the list of things that risk management in software testing involves:

• Identifying the issues that a team faces
• Learning the degree of importance of every problem
• Arranging the severity of problems in descending order
• Developing measures for the prevention of high-risk or potential issues
• Understanding the factors that can cut the risk probability
• Checking the effectiveness of actions/measures taken for risk reduction
• Evaluate the overall efforts made to counter risks.

Keeping all these factors in mind, most IT companies foster risk management systems that are made to monitor the set business goals. These systems usually work by considering the statistical data that comes from incident management, assessing risk factors, and analyzing the implementation stats. A risk management system helps you to locate all the measures that work best for minimizing risks or checking the effectiveness of IT efforts made at all levels.

On the contrary, not all IT companies have a risk management system in place as it needs significant investment to create a full-fledged IT risk management system. However, there are certain industries that are very likely to take advantage of risk management systems for their quality assurance needs. These include banking, insurance, telecom, retail, healthcare, and most industries that are aiming toward potential digitalization.

Since the government has imposed some serious guidelines on data protection, it is important that every industry should recognize the importance of IT risk management to establish a balance between IT risks and business performance.

Common Risks In Software Testing

Poor Communication

Lack of communication is one of the most significant risks that testers and developers may have to bear with a product. It not only creates undesirable outcomes but creates gaps in the lifecycle. More importantly, it restricts the requests to operational requirements that may save resources and effort.

Frequent Change In Requirements

Frequent changes in requirements often result in over-consumption of resources, errors, and exhaustion amongst QA teams. Furthermore, it impacts deadlines, finances, and ultimately the product quality.

Incorrect Prioritization

There are times when clients and QA teams work on little extra details while skipping the most significant aspects of the product. The situation, therefore, makes QA teams pay extra attention to secondary aspects of the product while neglecting the functionalities as a top priority. Therefore, it is necessary that any product highlights must be understood at the earliest to ensure all the core functionalities are achieved the earliest.

Steps To Risk Management

Since Quality Assurance is all about risk monitoring, it is necessary that QA teams should keep a constant focus on all the steps of risk management. The process may require risk management teams to work through the following stages:

Stage 1 - Detection

This is the primary stage of risk management that requires auditing of the project requirements as well as procedures made to develop and test.

Stage 2 - Analysis & Prioritization

The second stage involves analyzing all the potential areas of risk and then prioritizing the ones that can lead to maximum damage.

Stage 3 - Planning

Once all the issues are detected and analyzed, planning must be done to overcome all the issues causing risks

Stage 4 - Monitoring

The monitoring phase usually involves checking on the risks as well as plans

Stage 5 - Correction

The correction phase involves fixing all the errors or issues leading to risks

Stage 6 - Conclusion

The conclusion stage requires reassessing the risks for how they evolve with time. This stage even involves revamping the existing plans to ensure maximum mitigation and prevention against risk factors can be done.

The Crux

Whether it is software development or quality assurance, risks are an inevitable part of every project. Therefore, it is necessary that testers must never get afraid of the risks but rather understand risks as a part of quality.

Though the adoption of risk management practices and systems entirely depends on project budget and size, the general practices related to risk management can be easily pursued by every QA team.

From constant communication to frequent information exchange on the projects, keeping the entire QA team on the same page could do wonders in attaining the highest benchmarks of quality. More importantly, keeping a special place for risk management is vital to achieving immediate resolution on issues that may trigger severe product risks.