Quality control is an important aspect of software development. Many small software shops skip the importance of hiring a QA department with the attitude that it is cheaper and not needed. The fact is that software development relies heavily on a good quality analysis department to find unforeseen defects. QA departments are often seen as the enemy in a programming department, but QA can greatly help a development team by finding production bugs. Finding production bugs prior to them being promoted is completely advantageous to a business to help eliminate customer complaints and improve data integrity.

Most corporations may ask why they need a quality analysis apartment. Consider the aspect from the customer. If you release a potential bug into your production environment it can ultimately cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars in revenue. The fact is that even the simplest bugs can frustrate customers, or at the very worst it can cost hours of downtime which can ultimately cost you thousands of dollars when you need to take your production servers down to fix the bug.

When hiring a quality analysis team, attention to detail is probably the best trait for an individual to have. Quality analysis people don’t necessarily need to be the most technically savvy. If they can emulate a regular user, then they can help you use the development system exactly how your end users would use it. This can greatly become an advantage to your development team. A good quality analysis employee will bring an emulated end user to the system to find software bugs before they are introduced to the production environment.

Some organizations do not recognize the importance of quality analysis. Simple bugs can create incredible issues from software that can aggregate problems that cost the company large amounts of money. If a bug arrives from promotion and there is no kind of QA to verify its accuracy, then it can cost money after production. If mathematical calculations are inaccurate, then financial systems can charge customers too much money which can cause many customer complaints. They can also charge the customer inefficient amounts of money which can cost the company money until they find the problem. Finding software bugs after being promoted to production can sometimes take weeks or even months.

Even if your organization thinks it is more affordable to cut out a quality analysis department, consider the above issues. Quality analysis is an important part of any organization.