When building Rivers Agile on a foundation of quality, specifically the role of QA throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC), our founder envisioned a plan to redefine QA’s role within an organization. By involving quality assurance in each phase of a project, we’re able to reduce Dev/QA churn and add a level of consistency to the process.

The company’s foundation in quality assurance consulting enables us to drive maximum efficiencies in the agile software development process. Ultimately this ensures we’re aligning with your business requirements. We don’t just build a piece of software, we partner with our clients to conceptualize and develop real solutions.

We’ve identified four of the greatest benefits experienced within an organization from involving QA at every stage:

  1. Shift left by finding bugs earlier: While many think that QA’s go-time is after code has been produced, Rivers Agile’s strategy is to involve QA at the very beginning of the project. By involving QA in the product strategy, or roadmapping, phase of a project launch, the team is able to identify potential issues before even a single line of code is written. Developers are thinking about how to build, but QA is thinking about how to break! It’s an extra level of technical critical thinking that yields early results.
  2. Driving value in an organization by delivering quicker results: When done properly, having QA involved from the start means that instead of being a bottleneck at the end of the project, QA keeps their activities off the critical path. Test environment setup, test strategy, and test planning work is done concurrently with development, and QA can start executing as soon as code is delivered. Due to QA’s early involvement, they understand the business context and can simply start testing with minimal need for further clarification.
  3. Understand the client’s business to both verify and validate: The requirements elicitation and collection processes are imperfect. Even the best requirement specification fails to capture minor features and aspects of the project that are desired. QA verifies that everything that traverses the pipeline works as it should, and that the user story achieves its stated goal. Good QA goes beyond this, asking whether or not the team built the right thing. Does the function added deliver what the business needs to be successful? Or just what was specified? Identifying that gap is key.
  4. Reduce risks and unexpected costs: Good QA mitigates risk by ensuring the right things are tested at the right time. Projects can be quickly overrun when high priority defects are identified late in the lifecycle. Our proactive approach to QA aims to reduce those late night panic moments when you have to fix a major issue and risk overall regressions. These regressions can quickly invalidate previous test results.

We do everything in-house with our highly-skilled team of software engineers and quality assurance analysts. While there is no such thing as bug-free software, we ensure that popular happy path use-cases work early, helping to prevent launch day flop and embarrassing failures. It is because of our company foundation in quality assurance and testing that we have earned a reputation for high quality products. Join us on November 2 from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Pittsburgh Technology Council as we host a seminar on Quality Assurance: Act Early for Success.