There’s a big difference between successful software companies and those shoddy unverified apps you get off the app store:

Quality assurance.

While small-time apps aren’t heavily used, and the creator won’t receive many complaints or bad press if anything breaks, Google and Facebook are used by billions of people worldwide.

If a bug affects 0.01% of the user base in a small app, it’s not worth the energy. If it affects 0.01% for Google and Facebook, that’s thousands of complaints, and possible media scandal to deal with. And we all know what the price of that can be.

So, when it comes to studying quality assurance there’s no better examples than two of the biggest Internet companies in the world.

I’ve deliberately not chosen to give Microsoft the time of day in this post, because I’d say their QA is pretty damn weak for their size.

…However, read on to pick up tips from Facebook and Google on how to make software that doesn’t break down, cost you more money, and cause frustration for your customers.

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Thinking the terms ‘quality control’ and ‘quality assurance’ can be used interchangeably is a common mistake.

Whoever coined those terms did nothing to clarify their differences, but in fact:

• Quality control (QC) makes sure that your product isn’t riddled with bugs.
• Quality assurance (QA) makes sure engineers are following processes to reduce future bugs, and write code more efficiently.

Quality control is something development teams do every day. They squash bugs in the code they wrote, and run tests to catch future errors.

Quality assurance is the overall management of development processes that make sure less testing and QC needs to be done.

At Process Street, we’ve already looked at the wider implications of QC and how to run tests on your software. We’ve even provided you with a bunch of pre-made software development processes you can adjust to your own team.

In this article, I’ll go into an explanation of quality assurance in software teams, and how you can use this information for your own developers.

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If you’ve been reading our content about the importance of processes, you know the kinds of things that happen when standard procedure isn’t followed. Satellites crash, nuclear reactors melt down, and information security disasters ruin huge corporations.

For software companies, failure doesn’t always have such wide implications but it can mean carelessly shipping a product that creates catastrophic problems for your customers and destroys their trust in you. And of course, it’s a pain in the arse for your development team to fix.

In this article, I’m going to go over some famous software disasters where Quality Control dropped the ball, and look over some common quality control methods.

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In the lifecycle of every startup, there comes a tipping point.

For companies focused on aesthetics and creating something beautiful, there’s a time where the founders need to shift towards their product — look inward and think deeply about the problems it solves, who’s it for and how to refine user experience.

For product-focused startups like Process Street, a necessary early shift is towards design.

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What is Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)?

Yes, business process outsourcing is something that Coca-Cola does and spends millions on and something Vodafone uses IBM for to build its customer-related IT requirements, but it’s also for anyone and everyone.

It doesn’t have to be done on a massive enterprise scale, and in fact it can be even more impactful for small businesses because it means the difference between hiring a full-time legal team and using an as-and-when needed one from another company. That’s a massive difference in cost.

When you use an agency, or hire an accounting firm, that’s business process outsourcing. While the term has been taken over by enterprises and maybe shifted to mean something different, at its heart, every business does it. Every business without a full time accountant, legal team, marketing team, designer, IT guy, etc, does it.

It’s enterprise-y because it started out at those levels. Coca-Cola was a pioneer:

“ BPO is […] a subset of outsourcing that involves the contracting of the operations and responsibilities of a specific business process to a third-party service provider. Originally, outsourcing was associated with manufacturing firms, such as Coca-Cola, that outsourced large segments of its supply chain” — Forbes

But no matter what size company you are, there are considerations…

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Just like the basic ideas of processes and the division of labor, business process modeling was born in the mechanical industry.

In the winter of 1921, Frank Gilbreth presented a paper to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers entitled “Process Charts: First Steps in Finding the One Best Way to Do Work” — an excellent title by any standards, and something that turned a lot of businesses onto the idea of modeling their processes so they can optimize them.

Gilbreth, the paper’s author, is probably better known as the author and central character of the 1950s novel Cheaper by the Dozen. While I’ve never read it, it amused me to find it that an industrial engineer-turned-management consultant wrote a novel with time and motion study as an underlying theme.

Gilbreth was an interesting character, but also a man laser-focused on exactly what processes are for: finding the one best way to do work.

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The following is a guest post from Robin Singh. Robin is a Technical Support Executive with a combined experience of 6 years. He currently works with Live2Support – a live customer and sales chat software by ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.

Creating a great customer experience has never been more important, especially if you’re a SaaS company.

Your customers deserve a great experience and this is why it is important to support them with every tool in your arsenal. SaaS tools aren’t always perfectly self explanatory, and to ease the amount of support tickets and provide a self-serve option, you should be providing a knowledge base.

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is used by companies to reduce support tickets and bring down customer support costs.

At the basic level, it’s the FAQ in your website that helps customers find instant answers, on their own without calling your support or raising a ticket.

Using knowledge base software, companies can create not just FAQs, but all kinds of help content from user guides, software manuals, online wikis and more.

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If there ever was a three-word phrase that sounded dull enough to be a sedative, it’s business process management. 

It’s probably the vagueness that’s so off-putting. Which process? Managed how? Who’s business? In the last chapter, I went deep into what a process is and then why processes are important. I’ll recap so you don’t have to skip around.

A process is “a collection of interrelated work tasks initiated in response to an event that achieves a specific result”.

But what happens if that process isn’t achieving the result, or if it’s not achieving it very effectively? Every business has goals, but the interesting part — and what business process management actually is — is the exact steps a business will take to achieve those goals.

These goals could be anything from sending a newsletter on time every week to hitting $1,000,000 in revenue. Whatever the goals, your business processes are the roadmap for getting there. Not so boring, right?

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Let’s start off with something lighter than outright, embarrassing failure…

What’s your general feeling about assembling flat-packed furniture?

After putting together a desk and a couple of chairs yesterday, I’m still irked. Every hole is drilled about half an inch wrong so you have to have some kind of vice to align the damn thing, but that’s not the main problem…

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The essential customer success book to boost MRR at your SaaS company

A SaaS company without a customer success system is like a lion without teeth. You can chase customers all you like, but when you catch them you’re thinking “now what?”.

If you haven’t got a customer success team or set of processes in place at your SaaS company, it’s bad but not the end of the world.

Some SaaS companies are more self-serve than others, but all need a way to retain important customers and start exponentially compounding revenue.

This book for putting the systems in place to retain customers, whether that’s by learning about their problems or by properly onboarding them.

Better yet, it’s completely free.

What’s in the ebook?

• What is Customer Success?
• Why is Customer Success Important?
• What is Churn?
• How to Calculate NPS with the Perfect Customer Happiness Survey
• How to Shape Customer Retention Strategies That Beat Churn
• A Smart Way to Manage SaaS Customer Support
• Enhance Your SaaS User Experience
• How (and When) to Automate Your Customer Success Process
• What Customer Success Managers Actually Do All Day

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