With QA teams in place, you can ensure that the software that is delivered is consistent, reliable and meets business and the organization’s needs without sacrificing agility.
To ensure the software quality, the QA teams must ensure a few quality gates.
Quality gates are more than technical safeguards; they embody a shared commitment among developers, testers, and stakeholders to deliver software that truly adds value. Think of them as the traffic lights of your development lifecycle, providing clarity on when it’s safe to move forward and when it’s necessary to pause, reassess, and refine.
Let’s explore how quality gates can empower your team to build software that not only works but shines.
What Are Quality Gates?
A quality gate is a milestone in an IT project that requires that predefined criteria be met before the project can proceed to the next phase. Designed to provide benchmarks for quality standards, these gates are commonly used throughout application or software development projects. Typically, quality gates are located before phases that are highly dependent on the outcome of a previous phase, particularly where potential trouble spots need to be addressed and resolved.
The concept of a quality gate combines project management, decision modeling, and workflow management to increase measurability and promote superior conditions. Quality gates can be applied at many organizational levels, such as system, project, and release. Additionally, they can be used as part of the overall product development or quality assurance methodologies.
How Does Quality Gates Work?
Quality gates help ensure that a project is technically well thought out and can be supported after deployment. Quality gates are composed of predefined conditions based on aspects of the project that can be measured.
Examples of conditions could be the amount of vulnerabilities present in a project, whether outputs are on target or compile time. These milestones minimize project risk through phase-by-phase checklists and by enabling project managers to communicate the process continuously, reducing development cycle time by achieving higher success rates and increasing focus on a well-designed product.
When a quality gate is reached, the project results are checked against the predefined criteria, and status information is returned. The three potential quality gate statuses are the following:
- Pass-Quality: Gate metrics are met, and production can continue.
- Warn-Quality: Gate metrics may not be met, or just barely, and should be verified before production continues.
- Fail-Quality: Gate metrics are unmet, and issues must be resolved before production can continue.
Often, software projects fail to meet time, budget and other requirements, but monitoring the quality of project results by presetting benchmarks and steering a project at key points can help resolve these issues.
Steps to Implement Quality Gates
Here are easy steps to implement quality gates:
Step 1: Define Clear Objectives
The first step in implementing Quality Gates is to define clear and specific objectives. These objectives outline the purpose behind using Quality Gates: improving project quality, reducing risks, or aligning with stakeholder expectations.
Well-defined objectives act as a compass, guiding the setup and execution of the gates. They also establish a standard to evaluate their effectiveness, enabling ongoing improvement and optimization. Additionally, sharing these objectives transparently promotes stakeholder alignment and enhances the team’s ability to adapt to evolving project needs.
Step 2: Identify Key Milestones
It is crucial to identify the major milestones of the project in order to integrate fa ew Quality Gates or check gates for effectiveness.
In order to meet the goals and objectives, it is also essential that the following activities are carried out. These include the requirements gathering phase, design phase, implementation phase, testing phase, and deployment phase. To gauge the quality and the status of the project in each of these activities, specific metrics and exit criteria are defined.
Step 3: Establish Clear Criteria and Deliverables
Once the key milestones are identified, the next step involves outlining clear criteria and deliverables for each Quality Gate. These criteria should be measurable, objective, and easy to interpret, allowing for a straightforward evaluation of compliance.
For instance, they could involve completing particular tasks, achieving specific quality benchmarks such as defect density or code coverage, or submitting essential documentation.
Deliverables, on the other hand, should be concrete outputs that reflect the project’s quality and advancement, such as comprehensive design documents, robust test plans, or functional software prototypes. Defining these criteria and deliverables establishes a strong foundation for evaluating progress at each Quality Gate.
Step 4: Conduct Thorough Evaluations
Thorough assessments are the cornerstone of successful Quality Gates. Developing strong evaluation techniques ensures that all defined criteria and deliverables are met.
Conducting thorough evaluations involves detailed reviews, careful inspections, or stringent testing procedures to confirm that the software aligns with quality benchmarks and fulfills project requirements.
Step 5: Involve Stakeholders and Team Members
Clearly conveying their purpose and advantages fosters understanding, promotes collaboration, and secures essential support.
Stakeholders bring valuable perspectives on the criteria they prioritize, ensuring that Quality Gates reflects their needs. Involving team members helps uncover potential challenges and ensures that the defined criteria are practical and attainable.
Step 6: Provide Training and Support
Integrating Quality Gates often requires adjustments to your team’s workflows. Providing training and support on the principles and practices of Quality Gates helps team members grasp the process and understand their roles in meeting the established criteria.
Step 7: Establish Continuous Improvement
It’s important to regularly check the code quality and get feedback from stakeholders and team members, analyzing outcomes and identifying areas of improvement.
With this approach, you can ensure that quality gates remain impactful and aligned with the goal of enhancing software quality.
Step 8: Use Tools and Automation
Incorporating automation testing tools and CI/CD tools can significantly enhance the efficiency of implementing Quality Gates. With these tools, you can minimize manual effort, increase consistency, and improve the reliability of your evaluation processes.
Step 9: Document and Communicate Results
Documentation and communication are key to the successful implementation of Quality Gates. You should clearly document the established criteria, deliverables, and evaluation methods so that they are well-defined and understood by all involved parties.
Step 10: Monitor and Track Progress
Tracking and monitoring project progress in relation to Quality Gates is crucial for their successful implementation.
Clear processes should be established to monitor project status and track the completion of criteria and deliverables. This approach enables early identification of potential issues and facilitates timely corrective actions.
Regular reviews and status update with the development team and stakeholders help maintain alignment and ensure that the project consistently meets the requirements set by the Quality Gates.
To enhance the process and to ensure your quality and software pass the quality gates with ease adapting to cloud-based platforms is beneficial, as cloud-testing platforms ensure to provide you the test infrastructure without having to set up locally. One such platform is LambdaTest, an IA-powered test execution platform that allows you to run manual and automated tests at scale across 3000+ browsers and OS combinations. This platform not only allows you to perform automation tests across various testing platforms simultaneously but also offers tools like KaneAI, an AI testing tool that enhances your testing workflow and ensures adherence to quality gates. By automating test generation and evolution through natural language inputs, KaneAI simplifies the creation of comprehensive test cases aligned with your quality gate criteria.
This integration ensures that only code meeting the highest quality standards progresses through the development pipeline, reducing the likelihood of defects and improving overall software quality.
Incorporating AI-driven tools like KaneAI into your quality assurance processes not only streamlines testing but also reinforces the robustness of your quality gates, leading to more reliable and efficient software development outcomes.
Conclusion
In summary, Quality Gates is a vital mechanism for enhancing your projects’ quality, control, and success.
By predefining clear goals and objectives of what must be accomplished at certain project phases, conducting more detailed assessments, and focusing on the concept of project performance improvement, a project manager can enhance the quality of work, reduce risks on the project, and ensure that the project meets the expectation of the stakeholders.
While it is possible to find specific difficulties in implementing the Quality Gates, their benefits, like improved quality, early problem identification, increased cooperation between stakeholders, and better project control, suggest that Quality Gates are necessary tools for any project team.
