Quality Assurance Practices and Techniques Used by QA Professional in Continuous Delivery

Abstract

In traditional software development life cycle like waterfall and V-model, there are staged gates, where at the end of each phase, there are strict quality checks being done. If the check passes, the team is allowed to go to the next phase. After the emergence of agile software development, continuous integration and continuous delivery are widely practiced in most of the teams. Quality assurance checks happen as soon as the developer checks in and the code is further built and tested in the build pipeline. In continuous delivery, quality checks are being done instantly. The responsibility of the software quality assurance (SQA) professional is to ensure that the right process is defined in the project and the process works fine. The SQA conducts planning, reviews, and audits to ensure this. In the traditional SDLC like waterfall and V-model, audits and reviews are conducted before the end of each phase. There are lots of reference standards for this. However, the way software quality assurance should be done is very different in continuous delivery mode of development. There is less literature and standards available about how an SQA professional should operate when team is using continuous integration and continuous delivery. This paper provides an overall framework of continuous delivery quality assurance model, and the implementation results in information and communication technology (ICT)–Internet of things (IOT) domain.