Quality Assurance Process: 6 Essential Steps to Build Reliable Digital Products

You only get one chance to make a first impression with your digital product.

According to Forrester's 2024 US Customer Experience Index, customer experience quality among brands has hit an all-time low after declining for three consecutive years. At the same time, Forrester Research shows that every dollar invested in user experience yields a $100 return - an ROI of 9,900%. The gap between poor and excellent digital experiences has never been wider, and users have never been less forgiving.

A lot goes into crafting digital experiences that users trust, but a big part of it is comprehensive quality assurance.

Successful QA testing isn't just about finding bugs. It's about building trust, ensuring reliability, and creating experiences that keep users coming back.

Here's a general overview of a QA process that helps development teams build user-friendly web applications, mobile apps, and digital platforms - broken down into 6 actionable steps.

Every Project is Unique

Before diving into the steps, an important reminder: there's no one-size-fits-all approach to quality assurance. Each project requires tailored QA methodologies based on your specific goals, user needs, and technical requirements.

Everything starts with your vision for the application. The testing strategy, tools, and processes should serve that vision and adapt to what makes your project unique. After all, testing a healthcare platform looks different from testing an e-commerce site or a social media app.

Yet some principles remain universal. According to the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB), the primary objective in software testing is always ensuring end-user satisfaction. Establishing a clear Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) with defined phases helps teams achieve this goal consistently.

The six steps below focus on trust, reliability, and user engagement - the core elements that determine whether users embrace or abandon your application.

Foundation: Communication & Quality Mindset

There's no quality assurance without a quality team mindset.

When creating something that often has never existed before, a shared understanding of the project's goals across all team members becomes crucial. This means QA specialists participate from day one, not as a separate "QA Team" but as integral members of the Project Team working alongside UX/UI designers, developers, product owners, and project managers.

The most effective approach makes quality everyone's responsibility, not just the QA engineer's domain. QA professionals serve as bridges between team members and stakeholders, helping maintain user-focused objectives and a "quality attitude" that strengthens the entire team.

When the whole team embraces quality as a shared value, you move in the right direction from the start. In my experience working at Monterail, this collaborative mindset has proven essential. Shared responsibility transforms project outcomes.

Step 1: Define Clear Goals and User Requirements

Quality assurance begins the moment you start analyzing business requirements and translating them into actual user needs.

Effective QA teams do more than ensure clean, intuitive interfaces. They determine how people should feel while using your application. This emotional dimension shapes every testing decision moving forward.

In one of our projects, we worked on a mental health mobile application. Upon opening the app, users immediately faced questions about sleeping habits, employment satisfaction, relationship status, and other sensitive topics.

The team recognized that users had to feel safe enough to provide intimate information and, crucially, motivated to return to the app. Beyond color choices and design elements, we emphasized the pacing of each feature and analyzed the user journey in granular detail. We planned how to test these features long before implementation began.

By putting ourselves in end-users' shoes at this early planning stage, QA engineers can understand the product deeply and spot potential issues before they materialize. This perspective saves significant time and money across the entire development process. It means analyzing business requirements from a user perspective, identifying both emotional and functional needs, mapping critical user journeys, and documenting expected behaviors and potential pain points.

Step 2: Plan Your Testing Strategy

With clear goals established and team alignment secured, the next phase translates strategy into actionable test plans that define scope, resources, and success metrics.

Comprehensive planning enables teams to estimate testing duration accurately, calculate realistic costs, allocate required resources effectively, and identify potential risks and challenges early. It's the foundation that prevents costly surprises later in the development cycle.

Determining Testing Types

Modern software development requires multiple layers of testing. Manual testing handles user experience evaluation, exploratory testing for edge cases, usability checks, and complex user journey validation - anything that requires human judgment and intuition. Automated testing takes care of the repetitive work: frontend component testing, backend API and integration testing, regression test suites, and performance testing that would be tedious to run manually after every code change.

Then there's specialized testing that depends on your product's needs: API testing with tools like Postman, cross-device and cross-browser compatibility checks, security and vulnerability assessments, and accessibility standards compliance. The specific combination depends entirely on your project. A financial application demands rigorous security testing, while a social media platform needs extensive load testing and real-time functionality validation.

Creating Testing Documentation

Planning produces test cases, test scenarios, and detailed test plans shared with stakeholders. This documentation creates a common vocabulary and shared understanding between development teams and project stakeholders.

While documenting test cases and estimating every possible result isn't the most exciting phase, this precision proves crucial. It eliminates ambiguity and prevents unnecessary complexity from derailing your project later. You'll create a test plan document that outlines scope and approach, build a test case library organized by feature and priority, conduct risk assessments with mitigation strategies, estimate resource allocation and timelines, and define what testing environments you'll need.

Step 3: Establish Quality Standards and Code Review Processes

Before executing tests, successful teams establish the quality standards that code must meet throughout development. This step often gets overlooked, yet it prevents issues from reaching the testing phase.

Code Quality Assurance

Maintaining high code quality requires systematic approaches that catch issues before they ever reach testing.

Start with automated quality checks: implement linters and static analysis tools that catch issues automatically, configure automated code quality gates in your CI/CD pipeline, and set up pre-commit hooks that enforce coding standards before code even gets committed.

Then establish code review protocols. Establish peer review for every code change, create guidelines with clear acceptance criteria, and document your review process so everyone understands expectations. The goal is knowledge transfer and maintaining consistent standards across your team.

Regular knowledge sharing helps too. Conduct development meetings led by senior developers or engineering managers, share best practices and lessons learned across projects, and maintain updated coding standards documentation that everyone can reference.

At project kickoffs, assign a technical architect or engineering manager to each new project, review all quality standards before development begins, and create project-specific checklists based on requirements. In our work at Monterail, these preventive quality measures significantly reduce the defects that reach the QA testing phase. By catching issues during development rather than testing, teams accelerate delivery while maintaining higher standards.

Step 4: Build Your QA Infrastructure and Environments

With your plan defined and quality standards established, create the concrete testing infrastructure that enables consistent, efficient quality verification.

Setting Up Testing Environments

Establish dedicated testing environments where QA engineers can validate changes without blocking other releases. Depending on your project's complexity, this might include a development environment for initial testing, a staging environment that mirrors production, a dedicated QA/testing environment for comprehensive validation, and an integration environment for third-party service testing.

Multiple environments allow flexibility. QA engineers can test different features simultaneously even when bugs are discovered, maintaining development momentum.

Establishing QA Workflows

Create clear processes for how builds move from development to testing environments, how bug tracking and reporting systems integrate with project management tools, what communication channels connect developers and QA engineers, how you define "done" for different testing phases, and what release approval criteria and sign-off procedures look like.

Tool Integration

Integrate testing tools with your existing development infrastructure. This includes connecting bug tracking systems, test management platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and any tools from stakeholders' side to create a unified workflow.

Process automation enables teams to assess overall application quality whenever changes occur. For example, at Monterail, we set up automated test suites that run on every pull request, providing immediate feedback to developers before code reaches manual testing. It's like having a vigilant assistant who never sleeps and catches obvious issues before they waste anyone's time.

The goal is creating sustainable workflows that scale with your project's growth while maintaining quality standards.

Step 5: Execute Comprehensive Testing

With software entry criteria completed and specific QA environments prepared, the testing phase begins. This is where the action happens.

This is the most dynamic phase of the Software Testing Life Cycle, where QA engineers become the first real users of newly developed features. It's both exciting and demanding. You're discovering what works beautifully and what needs fixing before actual users encounter problems.

Testing Execution Activities

Test execution means running tests according to your plan and documenting actual results against expected outcomes. You're verifying that business logic implementation matches requirements and that everything complies with design specifications.

Results analysis goes beyond simple pass/fail. You compare expected versus actual results systematically, but you're also identifying potential user experience issues that might not technically be bugs but could frustrate users. This is where you assess features that build engagement in your application.

Bug management becomes its own workflow: reporting defects with clear reproduction steps and severity classification, collaborating with developers to prioritize fixes, retesting those fixes to confirm resolution, and conducting regression testing to ensure fixes don't introduce new issues.

Branch-Based Testing Protocols

Once developers merge tasks into the main or develop branch (depending on your project stage), QA teams conduct manual testing that covers several key areas. Business logic verification ensures features work as specified in requirements. Design compliance checks that implementation matches design specifications precisely. Regression testing confirms that recent changes haven't broken existing functionality. And throughout all of this, you're identifying any new issues introduced by recent code changes.

Regular regression testing maintains application stability as new features get added. According to research in software testing, catching bugs during testing costs significantly less than fixing issues discovered in production. For complex projects, maintain a regression test suite (both automated and manual) that covers critical user paths and core functionality.

Step 6: Monitor, Measure, and Continuously Improve

Quality assurance doesn't end when tests pass. The final step involves looking back at your testing process to identify optimization opportunities before moving forward.

Monitoring and Optimization

Regularly review your test coverage and effectiveness metrics, defect detection rates and patterns, testing cycle duration and bottlenecks, and automation opportunities for repetitive test cases.

If something isn't working effectively, modify it in line with your established QA process from Step 4. If critical coverage is missing, incorporate additional test types or tools. If manual testing becomes repetitive, identify automation opportunities.

Key QA Metrics to Track

While specific metrics vary by project, effective QA teams commonly monitor several key indicators. Test coverage shows what percentage of code and requirements your tests validate. Defect density reveals how many defects exist per module or feature. Defect detection percentage compares bugs found in testing versus production - a critical indicator of testing effectiveness. Test execution rate tracks tests completed versus planned. Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) measures average time to identify issues, while Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) tracks average time to fix defects.

These metrics help teams understand testing effectiveness and make data-driven decisions about where to focus quality improvement efforts.

Embracing Flexibility and Agility

Despite being in later project stages, effective teams stay flexible and ready to adapt. If new tools or methodologies could improve testing outcomes, try them. If stakeholder feedback reveals gaps in test coverage, adjust your approach.

Continuous improvement defines successful quality assurance. As the World Quality Report consistently shows, organizations with mature, adaptive QA processes release faster while maintaining higher quality standards.

Continuous Feedback Framework

Throughout all Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) phases, implement proactive feedback mechanisms.

Don't fight feedback. Don't fear it. Feedback is simply information about your product, and analyzing it drives continuous improvement.

Implementing Effective Feedback Loops

Successful project teams proactively give feedback and suggest improvements based on experience throughout the development process. This transparency and quality focus strengthens collaboration between development teams and stakeholders.

Teams should continuously review and iterate on features based on testing insights, maintain clean and maintainable code through regular refactoring, invite stakeholder feedback throughout all SDLC phases, and document lessons learned for future projects.

This openness allows everyone involved to feel comfortable with changes being made (and those planned for the future). It creates a truly agile software development life cycle where quality emerges from collaboration rather than gatekeeping. The feedback isn't the start of conversation, it's the culmination of the collaborative work already done together.

Build Trust Through Quality

Customer trust is difficult to earn, but very easily lost. Quality assurance is an essential function in the process of building digital products, supporting the delivery of high-quality products that users trust and recommend.

Quality starts early. Begin QA involvement from the first requirements discussion, not after development completes. Make quality everyone's responsibility, not just the QA engineer's job. Invest time in comprehensive test planning, environment setup, and code quality standards. Track meaningful metrics that reveal testing effectiveness and improvement opportunities. Stay adaptable by continuously refining your QA process based on feedback and changing project needs. And build incrementally, layering testing types to create comprehensive coverage.

Quality assurance is trust insurance. Every test case executed, every bug caught before production, and every user journey validated builds the foundation for user retention and application success.

Remember: technology serves as a tool for reaching your goals, not the goal itself. When QA teams adopt this mindset, they recognize user experience issues before they materialize and ensure that every release strengthens rather than undermines user trust.

If users trust your application, they're more likely to return. And when you increase confidence in your QA process, you increase users' trust in your application.