What Makes a QA Process Mature?

QA maturity is all about how consistently teams prevent, detect and respond to risk. There are some common characteristics found in mature testing organizations across all stages, from planning and collaboration to execution and measurement. And there are warning signs that indicate a process is still developing. 

QA teams with a mature testing process practice continuous improvement based on metrics that measure where the current process falls short. A team with mature processes uses the tools that work for the team but without creating re-work. Tools alone cannot define a mature QA process, though understanding which tools best serve the team’s needs — and investing in those tools — is a hallmark of mature teams. Mature QA teams also leverage different testing efforts when there is a positive benefit and it improves user quality. When a QA process reaches maturity, testing moves from being reactive to being proactive through quality engineering. 

Through quality engineering, testers and developers become tightly integrated. The bulk of testing occurs during development, and verification of production code testing is done post-release.

Once teams get there, software testing becomes a competitive advantage for the organization. Let’s dig into this a bit more. 

QA immaturity warning signs

There are a number of warning signs or software development tendencies that serve as reminders that your process is not mature. Teams that rush, prioritizing getting features out the door over verifying them, are likely to trigger some of these red flags.

When you notice any of the following actions, circle back and work with the team to establish better habits. Your QA process might be immature if:

• Defects routinely escape to Production that might have been caught on a Dev or QA test server.
• Test environment setup and deployment cause ongoing testing issues or false failures. 
• The team gathers metrics and performs the Agile retrospective, but improvements are never planned into the schedule or enforced. 
• Developers check code in without any testing attached to it. 
• Testing time continues to be eliminated or reduced to get more coding done. 
• Constant tool swapping.

Teams must select a tool to invest time and energy into using. Select a tool that works, and resist the desire to swap tools based on popularity. Go with what works, not what’s new. 

When warning signs appear, gather the team and work out the issues. Changing work habits is difficult, especially with experienced teams. Changing roles and mixing traditional work practices often takes time. It’s not a switch to turn off and on. The team has to work together to reach a stable, mature QA process that gets high-quality code delivered that makes customers happy. 

Benefits of progressing to a mature QA process

Creating a mature QA process often involves painstaking work, but the effort is worth it. The benefits of a mature QA process include: 

• No more hair-on-fire testing crises or performing emergency testing in production. 
• Test automation runs consistently and detects valid defects. 
• AI testing actually works to improve quality rather than just create a backlog of data for testers to review.
• Development code is tested as it’s built, so there are fewer surprise defects. 
• The testing process is standardized and fully documented. 
• Test environments are automatically created, avoiding rework or the need to support test server systems.
• Collaboration improves with cooperative cross-functional teams.
• Team turnover reduces and team members have greater job satisfaction.

Running in circles chasing defects doesn’t help anyone. With a mature QA system in place, teams can perform their jobs with a focus on creating standardized processes and consistent documentation. Test case management and test execution become integrated into part of creating and delivering code. Testers can then concentrate on auditing AI-generated outputs and conducting complex testing scenarios, UX evaluations or other tasks that rely on human intuition and creativity.

Core characteristics of a mature QA process

Behaviors indicative of mature testing processes should be observable in team members and the organization as a whole. Mature process development takes a considerable amount of time and concentrated effort, but it can eventually become ingrained into how a team works naturally. 

Team behaviors that signal a mature QA process include: 

• Proactive testing during code development.
• AI test automation that functions consistently without excess intervention or work.
• Steady team productivity with fewer crises. 
• Test environments are automatically created and populated with privacy-compliant test data.
• Humans performing testing tasks focus on identifying issues in high-risk areas, auditing automated test results and AI results to confirm quality. 

The team works together on all tasks, including documentation. Granted, team members have their own specialties, such as coding, testing, designing or deploying. However, in mature organizations, other team members can confidently perform each person’s task. Agile teams can create a positive productivity rhythm where tasks are completed on a regularly scheduled basis.

What does mature test planning look like?

Mature test planning is having a known test strategy for every release that accounts for significant new features or changes. The test strategy is part of the team’s quality engineering practice. In quality engineering, a team integrates testing and application quality into all stages of development — there’s no longer separate development and QA teams or schedules. Quality engineering becomes the test strategy blueprint that is built into all of the team’s tasks. 

Under quality engineering, the team ditches previous testing methods, where testers scrambled to catch up with development as a separate group. Quality engineering ultimately provides quality in an organized fashion that saves every team member time. The end result is a high-quality application that releases with fewer defects. Testers might still find UX issues or deep defects in complex application scenarios or calculations. But the majority of all customer interactions remain stable and functional. Fewer calls to support, less need to fix bugs on the fly. 

QA professionals validate the test cases, execution results and defects to verify how AI is testing. Crowdtesting teams can bolster testing during a release or validate the user experience. A crowdtesting partner like Applause can adapt to your evolving needs and pain points to help you maintain quality at a global scale. Find out how the application performs at intervals prior to release with a wide variety of potential customers with all sorts of possible variables.

Mature test execution and defect reporting

A mature QA process doesn’t just slide testing to the start of development, design and coding; it embeds it into all of the team's tasks. 

In a mature team, the majority of all potential defects should be addressed throughout the development cycle. Defects found during coding are fixed on the spot. The only defects reported elsewhere are those a customer reports or a team member finds. Even user-centric testing should be performed from the beginning of development all the way to the release. Testing efforts aren’t a separate activity; it’s all built into the quality engineering process and test strategy.

A digital quality partner like Applause can be useful here too, as crowdtesters can identify defects that elude the quality engineering team. Crowdtesters and expert practitioners execute user-centric tests to identify any issues associated with real-world variables, such as devices, platforms and connectivity. Applause can also be helpful in addressing specific needs that teams cannot account for in house.

Identifying areas to improve

Team metrics and measures must serve as an audit of quality in the production environment. Review any defects reported internally or from customers on the production server. A tester on the team might need to review the tests executed and map production defects to specific tests. Mapping defects from production identifies what testing was missed and where. If a team can create a reliable metric that identifies defect escape rate to production, it can lean on that to plug gaps in testing. 

There’s a slew of popular productivity metrics — many of which don’t seem all that useful. Team velocity for a team with mature processes should be boringly stable. If it’s not, then it may be a signal that the quality engineering process is experiencing issues trying to integrate roles.

Two metrics that can help measure application quality include business value delivered (BVD) and customer satisfaction (CSAT). 

BVD quantifies the impact of work completed during a sprint. It assigns value points for tasks that save costs, generate revenue or improve user satisfaction. Some tasks might support future functionality or updates to frameworks or API support. The value points are intended to represent the potential return on investment.

CSAT measures how customers react to the application. The CSAT is frequently performed by a customer support team or through a product manager. The goal is to get customers to judge the quality of how the application solves their work needs. 

Tracking these metrics can help mature teams improve the process of designing, coding and even testing. Mature teams make steady progress on improvement, even though it can be challenging to fit into a busy development team’s schedule. 

The biggest difference teams with mature QA processes make is improving business value by positively impacting the customer experience. When customer experience improves, so do typical business revenues. In a quality engineering approach, testing is no longer an annoying hurdle before release, it’s a real competitive differentiator in a crowded market.