How is Auditing and Software Testing Connected

Everyone in the business of testing software is aware of its importance. But auditing is just as important. This blog will help you to understand its importance and how it helps in your testing process.

Software testing is a process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding the bugs within. It is a type of software review in which one or more auditors conduct an independent examination of a software product. These auditors may not necessarily be members of the same software development team.
It comprises of a process or set of processes that helps you to assess a product’s compliance with pre-mentioned specifications. You can also use it for validation and verification that ensures a software program or application or product meeting your requirements that helped in its design and development.

How software testing and auditing complement each other?

A software firm’s test management software provides high-quality collaboration, even for your employees who work offsite. It lets you share information with ease. There is also the added benefit of reusing these test scenarios. This will help you to remove friction that may accompany test standardization and remote interaction.

Read Also: 5 Types of Testing to Make Your Mobile Apps User Friendly

What more do you need?
Software auditing also keeps your testing and QA teams on track. For those of you who are unaware, auditors are often responsible for verification of a product’s compliance with certain standards. But it is also their responsibility to maintain the integrity, security and sustainability of technical processes.
Hence responsible auditing and test management further ensures you that software is being developed and used in accordance with company requirements. This pairing is especially benefitted by organizations as it gives a good insight into day-to-day practices, along with areas needing improvement. Combining technology and procedure helps you to put these applications in a context where they can be correctly evaluated.
Need for Auditing In Testing
Auditing the Software Development Processes helps you to ensure transparency and reliability of the IT systems. From a technical point of view, an audit checks for what kind of bugs may have slipped through the cracks during testing which may cost your company millions.
In the context of testing, it helps us to ensure that the testing processes are followed as defined.

Various Testing Process Audits

The reasons to conduct auditing are in plenty and will certainly help you to achieve certain set of goals. Based on that we can classify them as follows:
Audit to verify compliance: The prime motive here is to evaluate if a process complies with given standards. In these scenarios, the actual testing process is compared with a documented one. For example, our software testing processes needs to be defined according to ISO Standards. The audit verifies whether testing was conducted as per documentation.

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Audit for improving process and problem solving: Here the motivation is to audit and trace the various steps involved in the process and try eliminating the problems. For instance it was noticed that quite a lot of software defects were overlooked even after following testing process to the core. So the audit is done as a preliminary step to collect facts and analyze them.
Audit for Root Cause Analysis: This type of audit deals with finding a root cause for a specific problem using various testing processes. For instance, if a customer discovers something wrong with your software. Retracing our testing steps helps to find out where and how things went wrong in a specific case.
Internal Audits 
Here initiation of internal audit is done from within an organization.
External Audits 
Auditing is done and initiated by external agencies while conducting external audits.