Quality assurance and audit are different matters. When you combine them, a QA audit becomes an effective tool to meet quality standards and improve the reliability of software products.
What Is a Quality Assurance Audit (QA Audit)?
A quality assurance audit is an independent evaluation of software and its development process. It is a documented process that competent personnel perform in a planned manner to evaluate the program against the requirements and the acceptance criteria the customer expects.
The key purpose of a quality assurance audit in software testing is to improve QA/QC testing processes continuously and build confidence in your product. Define the QA audit tasks according to the needs of your project and your business goal, in line with your testing process, product specification and QA team skills.
When You Need a Quality Assurance Audit
#1: Problems with Product Quality
Common red flags of poor software quality are bugs in production, bad customer feedback, software failures, crashes, security issues and performance problems.
#2: Software Testing Process Issues
The team has no clear understanding of how the testing process should work and why. There is no systematic process. The QA team does not know the sequence of its actions, misses testing steps and misses deadlines. QA managers spend too much time on operational issues.
#3: Unification Needs
A quality assurance audit is a way to standardize work. With an audit, an Agile team can develop standards across different projects. These standards make the projects in the company comparable.
#4: Drive to Grow and Work Better
For a company, this means scaling and income growth. For a QA engineer, it means aligning corporate interests with personal interests.
#5: Need to Improve the Maturity Level of the Company and Projects
Your software needs an audit to meet specified standards, certification requirements, legal requirements or licensing compliance, such as CMMI, ISO and other certifications that require process improvement. This way, top management expects to attract new customers.
Who Performs Quality Assurance Auditing
Whether you have worked in a company for a long time or just started, you need to know how to manage the QA audit process. You can conduct a quality assurance audit if you hold the following positions:
- QA Engineer
- QA Manager
- QA Lead
- Team Lead
- QA Coordinator
- Other specialists responsible for product quality
Who Needs a Software Quality Audit?
A QA engineer can initiate a quality assurance audit to monitor the efficiency of the current QA testing efforts. Investors also need an audit to reduce their risks and see the big picture. The audit benefits both sides.
Types of Quality Assurance Audits: Internal and External
- Internal audits: internal QA specialists perform them within the organization. These audits cover activities that directly influence product quality.
- External or third-party QA audits: independent software testing companies or individual QA professionals, such as external auditors and consultants, perform them. These experts have deep knowledge in specific areas, for example API testing, automation testing, performance testing, security testing, usability and accessibility audits.
Other types of reviews include:
- Risk Assessment Audit
- Process Audit
- Product Audit
- System Audit
- Compliance Audit
- Pre-Production Inspection
- In-Production Inspection
- Pre-Release Inspection
How to Perform a Quality Audit: Quality Assurance Audit Checklist
Auditing should be a controlled process with a well-defined strategy, without chaos or spontaneous decisions. That’s why a QA audit in software development generally includes these phases:
- Audit Planning
- Audit Execution
- Audit Reporting
- Audit Follow-Up and Closure
Many organizations add steps of their choice to the audit process. A good practice is a less detailed software audit program: it helps you spend audit resources wisely and shows that the audit follows a clear strategy. Let’s look at each phase in detail!
#1 Quality Audit Planning
I plan QA reviews in advance and break them into tasks that match the company’s objectives. The primary objective of my quality assurance audit is to gather information about the current status of a process and apply it to the SDLC areas we want to improve against defined criteria. Every finding can become the basis for improvement activities.
Areas We Include in an SDLC Quality Audit
- Project Management
- Scrum Process
- Quality Assurance
- Configuration Management
- Product Management
What Quality Assurance Auditing of These Areas Gives You
- Better transparency
- Understanding of the real situation
- A defined system of metrics
- Results analysis
- Growth areas
- Result metrics
- Measure of the non-degradation level
#2 Quality Assurance Audit Execution
I create a quality audit checklist so my team does not miss audit tasks. We perform them, and then I compare the audit results.
In this article, I share my QA experience to make your QA work easier. Take this free quality audit template. You can use this Quality Assurance Audit checklist as a basis and adapt it to your project needs.
Have you downloaded the QA audit checklist? Great! Look at the short instruction below on how to work with it.
Order of Quality Audit Steps
| 1. | Find a responsible person. The best choice is the Project Manager (PM) or the Product Owner (PO). |
| 2. | Schedule a meeting for 1 to 2 hours and set the Audit Date (column E, row 1). |
| 3. | Go through all audit points from the downloaded table. |
| 4. | Calibrate every point by weight from 1 to 5 (column A). |
| 5. | Set a preliminary mark Yes/No (column C) and add comments or tasks for improvement. |
| 6. | You can set a partial No with 1 or 2 points (column D) and a comment (column E). |
| 7. | After you complete all marks, you will see the result in % for every area (column D, rows 170 to 175). |
| 8. | The result appears in the bar chart and under the Audit Date (column D, rows 2 to 7). |
| 9. | For a new audit, add 4 columns after column F, copy columns C to F there, change the date and run the new audit. |
| 10. | Update the bar chart with the new data to see the progress. |
| 11. | After you get the results, define the areas and points to improve, create tasks for them in your task management system and add links to the tasks in the matching cells. |
Now, let’s look at a real quality audit example based on an area my software development company chose. I assign points while I talk to the person responsible for this area. I act as an impartial party. To avoid bias, I form an audit team where each member has an area of responsibility. For example, a team member sets the marks, and another member evaluates the results.
The column on the right shows the maximum score, and the column on the left shows the actual result. Mark data presence as Yes/No.
If there is no audit data to evaluate, but the parameter is critical for us, we mark the checklist item as ZERO. If there is no data and the parameter is not critical, it stays out of the calculations. The checklist shows it as N/A, because the circumstances may change in the future.
Quality Audit Tools for Inspection
During the inspection, use these QA audit tools:
- Questionnaire
- Evaluation
- Retrospective analysis
- Comparison
#3 Quality Audit Reporting
An audit shows the current project status. You can measure this status against another period, which gives you a retrospective view. I run this audit checklist every 2 weeks, and you can set a different audit timeline.
The retrospective view lets you track your level and control degradation trends, so it is very important for me.
#4 Quality Assurance Audit Follow-Up and Closure
The audit report describes the inspection results as a whole: conformances, nonconformances and recommended corrective actions.
It is a good practice to let the auditing professionals add their recommendations.
To complete the SDLC audit, schedule a team meeting to discuss the problems and document the actions the team needs to fix the identified failures. We use Jira to assign these tasks to the responsible people directly during the meeting.
Wrap-Up: Quality Assurance Audit Benefits
- Shows areas for improvement. Even if your current solutions work well, there are always things you can do better. A QA audit helps you find them.
- Knowledge transfer. A quality assurance audit gives the team a chance to learn and share knowledge. A person who knows the product or process well can use the audit checklist to share app knowledge and explain the reasons behind requirements, tasks or test points.
- Increased customer satisfaction. When you track software development trends and competitors, you can deliver a modern product your customers need.
- Control of quality costs and profitability. An SDLC audit also includes due diligence on your current infrastructure and the profitability of its modernization. The review shows hidden costs of further development and helps you control the risk of future investments. Software quality audits also often cover the future maintainability of your software architecture and its costs.
- Mitigation of potential risks. A critical audit starts with the identification of potential risks. A good practice is a risk management process that covers the risks to the organization, such as safety, quality, reliability, financial and reputational risks. You then plan audits by the identified risk levels. The higher the risk, the more often and the more detailed the quality assurance audit needs to be.
