We already know that DevOps has made the duration of the development of a software product short and also increased the quality. It is also a great method to make sure that the quality of the product is also high and the product gets developed according to international standards.

There are many practices that developers go through while developing software.  Even though DevOps has increased the speed and also maintained the basic qualities of the software enterprises.

They still have to make a separate QA team be safe. Having a team that specifically watches all the software products is actually a good idea because the scope of mistakes and low quality reduced, but what if it is actually increasing the cost of production.

We think that the cost that companies have to spend to assure the quality of the software is indirectly a development cost. If this cost if not decreased then it might reduce the profit that the company is making.

Read More:- How to reduce organizational cost by outsourcing custom software development

To reduce the cost what is important is to know that what actually makes the real cost of the quality. As of now the risk related to the success of software has increased and that is the reason all custom software development company needs to pay attention to the costing. Total costing and quality cost is something that has a direct impact on the chances of software getting successful.

The risk and the cost deciding factors are now changing and it is the time that organizations finally pay attention to it in order to improve their success ratio. This is indirectly reducing the risk of failure or something that can make sure that the profit is not reduced

Is Quality Free?

As per the famous personalities, it has often been stated that quality is free. Since there were no measures to maintain, detect, or analyze quality. Later on, a technique was initiated to analyze the costs of quality by breaking it down into modules in software product development.

As per the book, ‘Principles of Quality Costs’, the cost of quality has been stated as the sum of conformance as well as non-conformance costs. Till now it is one of the best measures to determine this cost.

Conformance costs include appraisal costs as well as prevention costs. While appraisal costs may include money invested in planning various activities related to software testing, development of test cases, execution of those cases, and more.

On the other hand, prevention costs consist of money spend on tasks related to quality assurance such as code reviews, requirements, training, and so on. It may vary in custom software development as per the demands of the company.

As far as non-conformance costs are concerned, they particularly consist of internal as well as external failures. Internal failures collectively include all the expenses that come when the test cases fail for the first time of its lifecycle.

Internal failures are often incurred by programmers who perform their own unit and component testing. They may occur in the whole process of software product development including research, programming, and releasing of the program in the test environment.

External failures, on the other hand, are much more destructive as they are incurred not by the tester but by the customers. The costs are higher in this process as compared to internal failures.

It results in other intangible costs such as damage to the reputation of the company, decreased sales, lawsuits, and angry or dissatisfied customers.

Thus, the cost of quality can be directly related to the investment made in testing and agile software development method. To maintain the cost equation in business, one must keep the quality cost low and prevent the problems as much as possible.

Read More:- Agile Software Development Methods: Review And Analysis

The market valuation is greatly used as an indicator of the costs too.  As the quality of software increases from time to time, the issue of customer churn is increasing too.

Here, the expectations of software quality persist. Customers have plenty of alternatives nowadays due to which the matter of quality has been highlighted more than ever.

When problems come up with a particular service or product, or software, customers tend to switch immediately giving no chances to the former one. Therefore, it is important to step forward carefully and avoid the reasons for customers to do so.

Changing The Perception Of The Cost Of Quality

The common perception regarding the cost of quality is that better quality will observe an increase in the costs. This notion has been questioned by various experts that the benefits of quality exceed its costs.

Quality is seen as the responsibility shared by each member of the organization. This concept of quality not only includes products and services but also every step of the supply chain including coding, testing, and various other tasks as well as delivery to outside parties.

Quality of cost depends on the situation and investment done in the various fields from its development to deployment and the cost of return and repair.

For perceiving the cost of quality, there are three ways that any business can opt. It is also an important point that quality is not something that is objectifiable.

Rather, it is subjective and every individual or organization can have their own perspective about what they count towards the quality of the product. The most popular ways are given below.

• Quality Costs More
• You Save More Than You Spend
• Quality Only Costs More

Quality Costs More

There have been examples when this statement is true and then there are others when it is completely not. Makers of durable and high-quality goods have to compete with makers of less quality with less priced goods.

Though the product investment in high-quality goods is much higher than that of low-quality goods, their profit might be less. This happens in a reverse manner in case of custom software development.

You Save More Than You Spend 

This belief is still a topic of debate for people from different mindsets. If improved quality products or services are provided to the customers, it automatically results in more cost of production, more investment of labors as well as time. In return, it results in an improved reputation and thus strikes a balance that helps in reducing the cost of quality in the long run.

Quality Only Costs More 

If the product or service has any fault in it, the cost gets increased by multiple times. There are plenty of factors that get affected such as the supply chain, reputation, cost of scrapping, and losing the materials, time invested, and much more. All these combine to result in great costs.

How To Reduce The Quality Cost?

To reduce the cost of quality of a product, enterprises will need to know about the main activities that have to be done to make it possible. One of the main activities to ensure the quality of software product development is to test it.

There are many phases in which testing is done and it is a deep concept in itself. The processes that are involved in testing has evolved in the past years and are now very much efficient. The software industry is changing, why? The answer is simple, requirements are changing, for all types of software.

Users now want different things, be it enterprise software or general software all of them have to be developed differently and traditional methods are not as effective now.

This is the reason why mobile app development company have to think out of the box and do things that makes the software good enough for the end-users.

 

Now, what effect does it have? The main effect is on the plan, the marketing time, the user experience, and the cost, all of them become uncertain, everything might be either very good or all may fall down. Falling down is not an option, all enterprises try for the best but luck only favors people who have some knowledge.

There is something that can actually keep the quality in check and also reduce the cost. The method that can help enterprises to do so is Continuous integration (CI)/ Continuous Delivery (CD).

Both of these are really important and they have been proven to keep the quality of software in check and also increase the ROI. The main reason is that it makes sure that software is developed successfully, they automate a lot of development processes that save time and cost and integrate and test simultaneously.

This can help software and custom web development companies to put development tasks into a pipeline that will ensure that all things happen according to a proper timeline.

The Challenges faced By Companies During DevOps and QA Testing

Automated testing is allowed by the above-mentioned method and it decreases the cost of quality assurance but there are some challenges that come with it.

When software is tested according to the traditional method it takes months to complete the process and before the enterprise can see the results.

As every web development company has to let go of traditional development processes they also have to leave the traditional testing methods too in order to test the complex software more efficiently.  Let’s look at the challenges that are faced by them

1. Skillset
2. Authoring
3. Initialising
4. Maintenance
5. Scalability

Skillset

It is very important that the testers who are going to automate the tests have a strong skill set. It is obvious that automated testing requires coding and that requires proper experience.

Just the way a developer writes code for an application they have to organize codes set the data, import different libraries, define various classes, and more for automated testing.

One thing that is required to do is to turn the manual testing into automated testing by turning manual testers into automation engineers. This is tough and the transition might even fail.

Authoring

It takes time to author the tests. No matter if the developers are freshers or experienced they need to take time so that the automated test that is made is strong enough.

Writing a single test is a task that needs focus, effort, and time. There are a lot of things like handling elements waits, making reusable components, and others that developers have to do while authoring automated tests.

Initialising

This is the part where most of the software development companies fail. Most of them are not properly able to initialize data and prepare it for the tests.

Data and its preparation have great impacts on how the automated tests will turn out. It is something that decides the accuracy of the test. It is really important to get this right because this is something that has a great impact on this. CI cannot be implemented properly if the data procession is inaccurate.

Maintenance

The stability of the test depends on the stability of the application. Something as small as screen resolution can change the output of the application.

Maintaining an application can make the job of a tester 30% easier. Maintenance needs continuity and this can be achieved by automating the maintenance activity.

Scalability

There are many issues that companies have to face when they want to scale their businesses. When the companies scale their business they also have to grow the application and that means they have to keep testing it.

With complex codes and extra features being added to the previous codes it becomes hard. The developers have to design new automated tests so that they can be relevant to the newly developed or modified applications.

Conclusion

DevOps and Quality assurance are two parts that have made sure that software products are developed both fastly and have good quality. There is a cost of the quality and it is mentioned above.

The ways to reduce this cost is also mentioned. It is really important to reduce it so that software companies can increase profit. Continuous integration and continuous delivery is the way to proceed but there are some challenges that users have to face with it too.

If web development company can overcome these challenges and automate the testing processes, they can reduce the cost and also ensure that the app is developed with high standards.

Automation also makes the custom software and custom web development process get into a pipeline so they get executed in a planned manner. The main important thing to know is, what are the things that make up for the real cost of quality, if an enterprise knows it, they can reduce it too.