How QA and QE Make Software Maintainable

Software is not static. If you create a valuable product that works well but is difficult to modify and accommodate new requirements, it will not survive in today’s market. Maintainability is a long-term aspect that explains how easily software can evolve and change, which is especially critical in today’s agile environment.

What is Software Maintainability?

Maintainability applies to the efficiency with which you can repair, update and understand software code. Software maintenance is a stage in the software development cycle that starts after the customer has acquired the product.

Developers take care of maintainability by continuously accommodating software to meet new customer requirements and address problems submitted by customers. This includes fixing bugs, optimizing existing functionality, and improving code to prevent future issues. The longevity of a product depends on a developer’s ability to keep up with maintenance terms.

Software maintenance is the most expensive stage of development, typically consuming more than half of development funds. It is vital to plan maintenance into the development lifecycle so you can manage software efficiently.

Software Quality and Maintainability

Software quality and code quality can create a world of difference for software maintenance.  Poor quality software is more difficult to maintain. Bad code needs a larger effort and costs more to adapt to new requirements. Software is more simply maintainable if it has high-quality code that is readable and well-documented, so have good coding practices in mind while your software is yet in development.

The Changing Role of Testers in Quality Engineering

Software testers, particularly manual testers, have a unique level of expertise and insight into their companies’ products since they’re one of the few teams that concentrate on the user perspective. They know the product inside-out, backward, and any other unexpected ways an end-user could ultimately navigate the site or app. As a result, testers are taking on a higher level of responsibility as each industry – including education, fintech, and travel- that plays on the user experience.  As development teams utilize DevOps and CI/CD to remain competitive, testers are moving to quality engineering to assure teams can deliver new features or products faster without losing quality. 

WHERE QUALITY MEETS MAINTAINABILITY 

As quality engineering is completed, a key – but often overlooked – aspect is maintainability. As product suites develop more quickly, they become more difficult to maintain, and the risk of vulnerabilities from outdated code grows. Quality professionals understand this challenge, and according to Bertold, can take action to decrease and manage this risk as part of standard sprint planning. 

First, the entire development and quality team requires to take advantage of automation to assure that all documentation is kept up to date. Usually, documentation is not a popular part of the quality process, which signifies it’s often outdated. Adopting test automation, particularly through platforms that present rich contextual information, helps software testers routinely renew test documentation since test automation data records how tests and code evolve. 

Second, think of your codebase like a plant. Just like gardens require to be pruned to ensure that each plant can concentrate on growing healthily, developers and quality professionals require to routinely audit their code for unused or outdated characteristics to maintain product quality. This involves third-party code, such as APIs, open-source components, and other integrations that play a growing role in the modern software heap. The aim is minimal, well-maintained components that satisfy your code standards and create a foundation for long-term quality. 

INTEGRATING MAINTAINABILITY INTO SPRINT PLANNING

The evolving role of QA is becoming more of an enablement role that encourages developers as teams to adopt modern testing methods. This expanded role now includes the complete SDLC as quality professionals simultaneously help engineers test their code earlier and join the dots between users and developers to assure that growth and quality are aligned with the consumer. With this holistic, collaborative perspective, the focus of quality teams requires to be on maintaining or improving quality while also restricting testing from becoming a bottleneck. To accommodate, quality teams are breaking out of the siloed work model to play a significant role in the sprint planning process. 

Generally, testers and developers have opposite views on code. Testers work to understand new products and characteristics from the outside perspective to recognize how users will ultimately navigate a product, while developers have an acute sense of how the product works from the inside. As quality shifts even earlier in the design process, testing specialists can arrange brainstorms that help the complete team recognize high-risk sprint priorities and begin planning a quality approach around those points. Engaging quality teams in the sprint planning process also enables teams to adapt to changing delivery programs. Even if a short-term fix is required to meet deadlines, truly effective QA teams will track when these fixes are performed and plan for more permanent solutions later down the line. This way, product velocity is maintained while code quality and maintainability are improved. 

Quality Engineering: The Key to Growing Sustainability

With software growing and developing more quickly than ever, development teams require effective approaches for managing quality and maintainability in the long term. Quality teams, particularly software testers, have the viewpoint and expertise to integrate maintainability into daily activities like documenting new features, sprint planning, and development pipelines to assure that companies can innovate while managing their code. 

Is your team looking to enhance software maintainability with quality engineering? Choose to team up with a QA services provider like TestUnity. Our team of testing experts specializes in QA and have years of experience implementing tests with different testing software. Partner with our QA engineers who can help your team in adopting the best suitable testing practices. Get in touch with a TestUnity expert today.

TestUnity

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform driven by a vast community of testers & QAs spread around the world, powered by technology & testing experts to create the dedicated testing hub. Which is capable of providing almost all kind of testing services for almost all the platforms exists in software word.