IT progresses while still, we sometimes find that interesting, that our potential clients don’t see as many benefits as we do having proper QA within the team.
A QA Engineer is a professional who finds bugs in a product or program before its launch, collaborating with developers on fixes to those problems when necessary.

For many, a QA engineer is closely related only to the development phase, when testers mainly focus on verifying system functionality. Involving QA in earlier software life cycles is often considered unnecessary cost generation.

Unfortunately, this approach is also a common mistake.

Each development team member has a set of unique features and experiences that will bring varying and valuable perspectives to any given business requirement. Having QA in the team from the very beginning of the project helps to save money in the long run because bugs can be avoided in the design phase.

As we well know, the involvement of QA in each phase of the software cycle is usually decided by the client and the selected form of software development. In Agile methodology, a tester’s work will begin at a certain point in the software life-cycle and elsewhere in the waterfall methodology. Much depends on the client’s decision and the budget. Having QA in the initial stages involves additional costs, but it can bring measurable benefits in the later stages.

What is the software life cycle and what role can a tester in each phase?

Requirements Analysis/defining

1. QA can already be introduced at the time of requirements analysis. Through his experience, he can show deficiencies in the logic of ambiguity in the requirements, which helps to save time and money during development.
   At this stage, he can also prepare a Test Plan, define entry and exit criteria, create general project documentation and a list of customer requirements
2. Designing
   At this stage, QA, through close work with the UX team, can get acquainted with the logic of the application, learn about dependencies, and find potential issues. Based on these views, QA is also able to prepare test cases and find critical places on which they will need to focus when testing the product.
3. Coding
   At this stage, the tester can test a single module. This allows the detection of any errors earlier and repairs at this stage do not affect the entire application
4. Testing
   Every tester waits for this stage. Each module of the application is now fully functional and you can start a full test. Thanks to the fact that the tester was present from the very beginning, he does not need additional time to read the documentation, business requirements, etc. The test plan is already prepared and the test cases are initially covered. This gives you a chance to find more bugs.
5. Deployment
   After the testing phase, the product is deployed to production or, depending on the customer, to the UAT environment, for further testing by the customer. The role of QA in this phase is to provide the necessary documentation tools, etc. After the client has completed the tests, QA assesses reported bugs and checks whether they are reproducible, and then the developer team will fix them. After this phase, if the client decides that the application meets his expectations, it is launched.
6. Maintenance
   This phase takes place when the product is entirely usable. The Maintenance Phase includes software updates, enhancements, and bug fixes.
   When making changes, QA’s job is to make sure that the fix itself works properly and that it doesn’t have a negative impact on the rest of the application. Another QA task during the maintenance phase is to keep test cases up to date and maintain automated tests, if any, in the project.

Now we know what is the role of QA in the software life cycle, we can go to the summary.

Involving QA from the very beginning generates costs, but the lack of a tester can generate even higher costs at a later stage of software development.

Correcting a mistake is more expensive than preventing it at the planning stage. Even a repair at a later stage may generate further errors and then the costs increase exponentially. Tests are an integral part and help developers to find errors as early as possible, which translates into increased quality of the delivered software and delivery of the product as close as possible to the customer’s expectations.