🐞 QA Stands For Quality p.4 - Quality In Quality Assurance
What Quality really is and what it is about (SPOILER: Requirements and End-User Expectations)
Hey friends 👋
Welcome to the next issue of this QA series, where I share the information that helped me become a QA and that I picked up over the years to climb from a Trainee QA to managing an entire department, and that I used to teach as a course on how to become a QA from scratch.
One of the most fundamental things every QA should understand is what Quality is, how to define it and measure it. We usually use this word to describe something vague and abstract, but in the field of QA, it actually has a very specific definition, and you can easily assess whether a game or a software you are testing is a quality product.
Alright, let’s get into it.
🤔 What “Quality” Really Means
First things first, quality is how well a product meets its requirements and user expectations in a consistent and reliable way. And there are at least 3 different types of requirements when we talk about any type of software (we’ll talk more about them in the future):
Functional – what the product must do (calculate and save your money, buy stuff, entertain you etc.)
Non‑functional / technical – how the product must do it (performance, stability, compatibility, security, understandability etc.)
User requirements – what a real user would expect this app to do and behave (clarity, predictability, efficiency, accessibility)
Games and software share this definition, but games have some additional complexity in all of those requirement types: physics rules, timing windows, content triggers, animation behaviour, AI logic, and performance under heavy interaction etc.
The bottom line is that quality is completely objective, testable and not at all an emotional attribute of a system or a product.
