Apps Need Quality Assurance Also

Many people equate the requirement for Quality Assurance with old applications in large businesses. However Apps need Quality Assurance also, although for different reasons.

Many of the old applications in large businesses are mission critical to the business and their profitability. Failure of those applications will have major repercussions and may drive the business into bankruptcy. The traditional argument for Quality Assurance and Quality Control hinged on that concern and there is no reason to change that attitude in that situation. As a colleague said, ‘I need to know what was done, how it was done and I need to know it was done correctly. Then I can go to my management with a recommendation that the application be released into production with assurance that it will work’ Suffice to say he works for a bank and a failure will hurt.

At the other end there are the thousands of individual apps now available on a series of platforms and operating systems that are targeted at a specific limited audience and may have limited appeal to the bigger audience. The comment I heard at a recent TASSQ meeting is that the Apps must ‘Excite’ the audience and furthermore they must get good reviews, no negative reviews, and be somewhere close to the top of the popularity list. Otherwise you might as well withdraw, rebuild, rebrand and re-release the app as new. It is too late to fix after the fact. If that sounds suddenly familiar that is because we have just repeated the Quality Assurance argument. More than ever we need to get it right the first time. As stated above, there is now no time to fix it. We only have one chance. This does not mean bogging down the app in a long drawn out testing cycle. This means getting it right all the way along the cycle. Then we will have apps that excite! Quality Assurance provides that guidance.