What is QA and Why It Matters?

After a month-long holiday in the Philippines, I came back to France refreshed and ready to take on the challenges of the new year.

First thing on the agenda is to give a 10-minute presentation to everyone in the company on what QA is and why it matters. This will be addressed to everyone in the company with different backgrounds and understanding of QA. Some have more technical knowledge and know about QA topics, but half have no idea what QA does or stands for. Even some interchangeably refer to QA with Q&A.. #truestory

After reflecting on what to share, I asked myself the same question. Why does QA matter? Why should you care about QA?

Well for starters, QA is important for me since it’s what employs me right now and pays my bills. But on a more serious note, what can we really benefit from having QA in our organisation? And I’m not talking about the QA team or having QA engineers but on a broader spectrum related to QA processes and activities that we must have in our organisation.

First, I would ask you to imagine yourself ordering a pizza right now. You probably want something simple like Margherita or a bit more indulgent like a Diavolo with mozzarella, some spicy salami and chilli peppers.

You put in your order and waited for it to be delivered since you already planned just stay at home and watch the latest season of Squid Game on Netflix.

Then your pizza order arrives and voila — the pizza crust looks burnt and why are there no olives nor fresh basils on top?

And even worse — are those pineapples instead????? Boom!!! Your night is utterly ruined.

Now, wouldn’t it have been great if someone double-checked that order before it left the kitchen?

Well that’s what QA does — but for our product.

But before going into those technical details. Let’s first understand what exactly is QA?

QA is not Q&A (Question & Answer) ✌️but rather stands for Quality Assurance. It is the process of ensuring our software works the way it should and the way you (and our customers) expect it to.

Therefore, our QAs help us catch the “🍍pineapples” in our product before they ruin our users’ experience.

But it isn’t just about finding bugs🪲🐛… Thanks to our team of “pineapple catchers”, we are ensured that the product does what it promises. They also ensure that it works smoothly and reliably and that our users don’t want to throw their devices (or their 🍕) out of frustration.

Now that we have at least some ideas of what QA is.

Why does QA matter? Why should we even care about it?

Before answering that question, let’s recall some significant incidents that happened in 2024.

In July 2024, a faulty update to Crowdstrike’s Falcon Sensor security software caused approximately 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems to crash worldwide. This was the most prominent IT outage in history, disrupting critical services, including airlines (I experienced it first-hand — getting stuck at the airport for more than 10 hours), banks, hospitals, and emergency call centres. The global financial damage was estimated to be at least $10 billion.

In the same month, but in a completely different incident, Microsoft also experienced a global outage, especially on their Azure platform, which disrupted services for numerous businesses and users globally.

I am not saying that QA is the hero who would have prevented these major incidents, but there would have been significantly higher chances of them not happening if proper QA had been done.

Then again, I'll return to the question of “Why QA matters, and why should we care about it?”

First off, Trust and Confidence. Imagine launching a new product feature, and it crashes on Day 1. QA helps us avoid these embarrassing moments. Our customers trust us because we deliver a quality product. And our team internally is confident that what we give our customers works as expected and even more. 😉

Second, it Saves Time and Money. Many may not realise this, but fixing a bug before the production launch is cheaper than fixing it after. QA is a reliable safety net that keeps us from falling into expensive disasters.

Finally, Happy Customers. Users stay happy and loyal when things are working. Think of QA as the bridge between the hard work we put into developing our product and our users' satisfaction with it.

So, what do we actually do in QA?

The majority of our work in QA is a continuous attempt to uncover information about things we’re unaware of and ensure that the things we think we know are still valid. Once we have that information, we can decide what to do next.

We can classify QA into two broad categories: Investigating and Verifying

During the investigation stage, we employ our creativity to gather new information about the product. Each investigative activity provides additional information, allowing us to expand our understanding of the product and guide further exploration.

In the verification stage, we have a pre-existing expectation of what should occur. We then verify if these expectations still hold, typically through a PASS/FAIL evaluation. If the outcome is a PASS, the information has been verified and remains accurate. If the outcome is a FAIL, we have discovered a problem or new information requiring our attention.

So, our activities typically fall between investigating and verifying information.

We do much more than clicking buttons and breaking things (though our #pineapplecatchers are really good at that). Like detectives, we explore the features of our product, looking for anything that feels off 🕵, and this exploring is done during manual testing. We then write scripts that check things automatically so we can test faster and more often, which we generally refer to as automated testing. We also collaborate with developers, designers, and product managers to ensure everyone is aligned on quality.

Also, we use all the new and existing information uncovered to help us with our test planning and strategy, defect reporting, and management of tools and the environment to perform continuous investigation and verification.

Just remember that QA is here to ensure we deliver products that work, wow, and win the hearts of our customers. Without QA, we’re just sending out pizzas 🍕 and hoping they’re right.