What is Quality Assurance in Project Management and Why It Matters

Quality assurance (QA) is a critical process in project management that helps ensure the success of a project. By implementing quality assurance, project managers can minimize risks, reduce costs, and deliver high-quality results that meet stakeholder expectations

In this comprehensive guide, we will walk through everything you need to know about quality assurance in project management.

What is Quality Assurance?

Quality assurance refers to the systematic activities and processes implemented throughout a project’s life cycle to ensure that product or service requirements are met. It focuses on identifying defects and areas for improvement early on to avoid bigger, more expensive problems down the road.

The core goal of quality assurance is to build quality into the development process. This is accomplished by:

• Setting clear quality standards upfront that align with business objectives
• Continuously inspecting and testing work products
• Utilizing metrics and quality control tools to measure and analyze results
• Identifying root causes of issues and implementing corrective actions
• Fostering a culture of quality across teams through training and accountability

The Role of QA in Project Management

Quality assurance is a fundamental element of project management best practices. Here are some of the key ways that QA supports project management success:

• Minimizes risk – By testing and validating work products early and often, QA helps identify defects that could turn into big risks if left undetected. Catching issues early is always cheaper than fixing them later down the line.

• Increases efficiency – QA processes like inspections, walkthroughs, and testing can help uncover inefficiencies and redundancies in processes. Identifying waste leads to streamlined workflows

• Delivers value – QA verifies that project deliverables actually meet business and user requirements. This ensures that stakeholders receive the expected value.

• Improves customer satisfaction – High-quality deliverables that fulfill needs and expectations lead to improved customer/user satisfaction and loyalty.

• Reduces costs – It’s exponentially cheaper to build in quality upfront through prevention rather than fix mistakes late in the project life cycle.

• Enhances quality culture – QA activities facilitate learning, accountability, and process improvement across teams.

Quality assurance is not just about finding bugs. It’s a strategic function that protects the business value of project initiatives.

QA Process in Project Management

QA needs to be baked into project management processes from the start. Here is an overview of key phases in the QA process:

1. Quality Planning

This first step is all about defining your quality standards and objectives upfront. Common activities include:

• Gathering requirements from stakeholders
• Conducting risk analysis
• Developing QA strategy and test plans
• Assigning QA roles and responsibilities
• Selecting metrics to monitor quality

Aligning on quality targets early prevents defects down the line.

2. Quality Assurance

With your quality plan established, QA activities can be integrated into execution:

• Inspections – Review requirements, designs, code, or other work products for issues
• Walkthroughs – Step through work products collaboratively to identify defects
• Testing – Execute test cases to validate functionality and identify bugs
• Audits – Assess process conformance to standards
• Metrics analysis – Track quality KPIs to spot trends

Continuous QA saves time and money compared to leaving it all for final testing.

3. Quality Control

Quality control refers to the steps to verify quality standards are met:

• Reporting on testing statuses, defects, metrics
• Decision making on next steps when issues are found
• Process improvements to address root causes
• Change implementation like rework or updates to address failures

Quality control ensures outputs are timely and align with acceptance criteria.

4. Continuous Improvement

Finally, use lessons learned through QA activities to improve work processes for current and future projects.

Key activities include:

• Process analysis to identify inefficiencies
• Root cause analysis on recurring issues
• Training to strengthen team capabilities
• Updates to standards reflecting new best practices

This creates a feedback loop for ongoing quality and process enhancements.

QA Techniques and Best Practices

Some specific QA techniques and tips to build into your project management approach include:

• Holding quality audits to verify process compliance
• Using statistical sampling to test subset of items
• Establishing quality gates at milestones before proceeding
• Leveraging test automation to increase coverage
• Inspecting early deliverables like requirements and designs
• Testing continuously throughout development
• Selecting pilot users to test functionality
• Tracking quality metrics like defect densities
• Prioritizing quality hot spots for additional testing
• Performing regression testing when changes are made
• Using quality management tools like checklists and reports

Building these QA activities into your project schedules and plans will help achieve your quality goals.

QA Metrics and KPIs

It’s critical to define metrics to track quality assurance performance. QA metrics allow you to catch issues early and demonstrate progress. Examples of key QA metrics include:

• Defects by severity and priority
• Defect densities per module/component
• Defect removal efficiency
• Test case execution and pass/fail rate
• Test coverage for requirements
• Inspection defect detection rates
• Rework effort
• Escaped defects to production
• Mean time between failures

Analyzing these metrics can help spot problem areas and improvement opportunities. They provide insight into the effectiveness of quality assurance initiatives.

QA Roles and Responsibilities

Strong QA governance requires defining clear roles across teams:

• Project managers – Develop overall QA strategy and test plans. Oversee quality processes.
• QA managers – Establish standards, metrics, tools. Report on quality results and trends.
• Test managers – Lead test planning, coordination, and defect tracking.
• Test analysts – Identify test scenarios. Execute test cases. Log and track defects.
• Developers – Support root cause analysis on defects. Fix bugs.
• Business analysts – Define quality requirements. Review designs and test cases.
• Product owners – Prioritize defects and sign off on release quality.

Alignment between these groups is key for consistent quality targeting and issue escalation.

Quality Assurance Tools and Techniques

There are a wide variety of tools and methodologies teams leverage for quality assurance:

• Test case management – Tools to organize and manage test documentation and results. Eg: TestRail, Zephyr
• Defect tracking – Tools to log and track defects through resolution. Eg: Jira, Bugzilla
• Test automation – Tools to automate execution of repetitive test cases. Eg: Selenium, Ranorex
• Load testing – Tools to validate performance under heavy load. Eg: LoadRunner, Apache JMeter
• Security testing – Tools to detect vulnerabilities. Eg: Netsparker, Acunetix
• Continuous testing – Tools to enable ongoing test execution. Eg: Jenkins, Bamboo
• Static analysis – Tools to detect code quality issues. Eg: SonarQube, Coverity
• Reviews and inspections – Manual techniques to identify defects in documents.
• Unit testing – Low-level testing of individual code components.
• Integration testing – Testing interfaces between components.
• System testing – Validating the end-to-end system.

Choosing the right mix of QA tools and techniques is key based on project risk profile and quality objectives.

Integrating QA into Project Management with Wrike

Wrike provides integrated work management tools to help plan and track quality assurance activities within project timelines:

• Build QA checklists into project templates to standardize test cases
• Create quality gates at milestones to control flow
• Log ** defects and bugs** as inline comments or custom fields
• Generate QA reports with dashboards and charts
• Manage requirements and traceability in the tool
• Assign and notify testers of execution tasks
• Provide full visibility into progress and coverage
• Enable real-time collaboration across QA, dev, PMs

With Wrike, you can bake quality assurance into agile processes and monitor status through integrated reports and dashboards.

Keys to Effective Quality Assurance

Here are some core tenets for developing a strong quality assurance process within project management:

• Begin quality planning early when impacts are low
• Develop objective, quantitative quality targets
• Inspect work products continuously, not just finished outputs
• Leverage user feedback and pilots to validate usability
• Automate repetitive testing whenever possible
• Implement quality gates to prevent uncontrolled flow
• Use risk-based strategies to prioritize testing efforts
• Track quality metrics rigorously
• Foster culture of quality ownership across teams

Following these principles will lead to proactive defect prevention and lower project risk.