Types of quality assurance testing

When evaluating a product's quality, organizations typically use a combination of automation and mechanical testing. Understanding the different approaches you could take to QA testing could help you build an effective QA plan. Below are some types of QA testing and a description of when to use them in your product development process:

Integration testing

Integration testing examines each component of a product to make sure all components work both individually and with one another. For instance, a company may examine a line of code that helps tell a program to share a file on your computer with another user. During integration testing, it's important to ensure this code functions correctly within the program and the other user can receive the file as intended. Integration testing often occurs in the developmental stage and also allows a company to identify any flaws.

System testing

System or functional testing is a process that measures the success of a completed software product with set requirements. Companies use this type of testing to look at the whole of a product. This process helps you understand how a fully integrated product interacts with the system supporting it. Organizations use system testing when they are further in their product development process and about to launch a product.

Feature testing

Feature testing helps a company ensure that a new feature or adaptation maintains its integrity to users. This helps the organization improve the user experience. To test a specific feature on an application, a company gathers relevant metrics that tell them how visitors engaged with it. Based on the collected data, a company can determine if the feature leads to negative or positive behavior. Organizations conduct this type of testing after launching an application to see if they need to add changes to help it operate more effectively.

Usability testing

Usability or user acceptance testing evaluates how a product interacts with the user and how simple it is to operate. Usability testing may reveal how a product makes the customer feel, if they can easily identify its function and whether it aligns with common preferences. For instance, if a business created a new type of umbrella, they may give pedestrians their umbrella to use on a rainy day and observe whether they understood how to open it, found it useful and would use it again.

Implementing these types of tests can help you predict your product's success and determine if you need to make any changes to the interface or design. Typically, companies conduct usability testing before launching their product so they can make adjustments as needed. Some organizations also perform formative usability testing, in which prospective users react to design, blueprints or prototypes.