Plan > Quality Assurance Plan

Why

A QA plan is critically important to ensure the quality of the product or service. It helps to:

• Ensure the quality of the product.
• Ensure the product meets the set regulatory standards mentioned in service level agreements.
• Monitor and control the level of quality and other matrices to analyze trends and continuously improve.
• Describe specific document standards, practices, procedures and improve the communication within the team.
• Establish trust and confidence in the business among customers and help the business compete with others in the same market.

How

The end goal of quality management should be to come up with an end to end process to ensure the quality of your product. There are two main aspects:

1. Quality Assurance (QA): Is about preventing a defect from happening. This is a proactive measure and focuses on following a correct procedure to prevent bugs. Consider the following:
   • Understand the quality requirements of the product.
   • Communicate and build awareness to ensure that quality is viewed as a team responsibility.
   • Build test cases around features and non-functional requirements.
   • Invest on test automation.
2. Quality Control (QC): Is about ensuring that a certain quality threshold is maintained by the product. This is a reactive approach to ensure that anything that does not meet the quality requirements are shipped. Consider the following:
   • Execute quality verification processes such as regressions and smoke testing.
   • Ensure that DevOps pipeline fails when the automated tests fails.
   • Ensure at least the non-functional requirements stated in the SLAs are tested.

Considering both QA & QC aspects, the following actions can be used to build a test plan:

• Ensure quality objectives are identified.
• Define QA roles and responsibilities.
• Coordinate with developers, scrum masters and product owners. The QA plan should be aligned with the other management plans such as risk management plan, change management plan and resource management plan.
• Define methodologies and standards. Consider risk management standards, project management standards, information security standards, data protection and privacy standards, business domain related standards, etc.
• Determine QA tasks and time schedule.
• Gather details on testing, staging and production environments.
• Plan, review, audit and continuously improve.

References

• Sample QA Plan
• QA Plan
• Difference between QA and QC