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Software Quality Assurance or SQA consists of a system that supervises software engineering and development based on factual studies. These ensure the quality of the product. This assessment process is supported by one or more standards, usually IS0-9000 or CMMI. It is essential for the developmental manageability of projects and better outputs.

The percentage of companies that choose the route of SQA in Pakistan is lower than what it should be, however a few people have taken the initiative in promoting the concept here. Khurram Javaid Mir, Chief Marketing Officer of Kraysis Ltd, is one of those people. Talking about SQA, Khurram says, “The earlier you engage a QA person in your product life cycle, the earlier you can debug. It becomes a bigger disaster as this process is delayed. We tell people that if you invest into QA earlier in the development cycle, it will reduce your cost of having to rehash code at a later stage, which at times can take a very VERY long time!”
Quality Assurance can help in managing software debugging and companies can save valuable time without having all procedures redone from the start. It helps cut costs as well as time and induces efficiency in the development cycle. QA managers can tell the company about the problems and precautions of the expected or occurring errors so the developers can solve them on time. This way, it saves the cost of reprogramming parts of the solution as well as saving a tremendous amount of time. Otherwise, if a project falls apart later without any warnings, developers will have to redo it again from scratch.

Yes – the process of trying to put the pieces back together is comparable to the amount of time and expertise it takes a CSI to conduct a forensic investigation!
As Khurram described it, “The matter of attention and concentration in any QA outsourcing scheme is the perception of the area or domain understanding. Therefore, a series of conference calls and on-site meetings are established with project managers and developers to know their demands. This information is analyzed to know the company’s progress and work data so far. Based on all this information, possible solutions are then considered. This specific data set of solutions is called a complete Test Scenario Matrix, which details all the aspects and steps of the application to be tested. Once the feedback process is completed, a detailed test plan is developed, which is then shared and reviewed by the client.”
After that, Kraysis begins product testing and sending daily bug reports. A cycle develops when the developers fix the bug and Krasis can do regression testing. This process carries on until the client and Kraysis determine that product has achieved enough stability to be released. That is how QA’s normal process works and it eventually becomes a cyclical process with information flowing between Kraysis and client.
QA as a Career in Pakistan
QA is such a field that a majority of the software engineering students in Pakistan opt out of and its scope and deployment is lower than in other countries. Khurram tells us about his tendencies and reasons for working in this field. Khurram was in the first year of his Masters in Business Administration when Jamil and Mustafa were ready to set up their company in LUMS. The three of them had been involved in SQA in one way or another during their careers and academic period. Moreover, Khurram worked in QA departments of some of the best software companies of Pakistan. When we asked the motives of why they chose the niche field of QA, he said, “We wanted to create an impact and make people realize that quality assurance is a very critical area that is desperately neglected. One that needs far more creativity and research than what is being done right now in our industry. We had this idea in mind and took up the challenge and have been gaining momentum since then. In about 2 years, we have expanded from a team of three to twenty people.”
He also said that they are not competing against any quality certification however, the company hopes to achieve a certification for CMMI auditor later on.

“There are many other important certifications like CMMI. There is an obsession in this part of the world that CMMI will do something great in terms of the end quality of the product. The problem in Pakistan is that most small and medium enterprises cannot afford it. Even though, they want to save their time and manage everything precisely but they just cannot afford it. Our main objective is to be helpful to these smaller companies as they form the bulk of our industry”, says Khurram.

The Cost of Doing Business
“The way things work in the field is that the developer deals in a lot of hypotheticals. Different scenarios and various situations. Our QA process helps them to make use of our solution even they have a budget as low as Rs. 60,000.” And then as with any entrepreneur and marketing professional, he justifies the breakdown of numbers. “If you start adding fixed costs related to a QA department, the cost of handling human resources, cost of training, variable costs, cost of any RnD in tools and trainings, it makes perfect sense to have us take ownership of the entire process. Moreover, we charge on hourly basis so you do not have to pay for any time when we are not working. Hence, there is a significant cost advantage through this as well.”
Trends are changing in Pakistan. Quality assurance is gradually coming into perspective.  Khurram comments, “We initially worked with Monis Rehman for Rozee.pk and after that we received a lot of international clients. We have a number of clients, the number which only increases with the passage of time. Only recently have developers started to understand the advantages of employing QA into their projects.”
We asked Khurram about OpenSourceware in relation to their quality assurance services, and its adoption by Pakistani organizations. He commented, “Open source technology has its own advantage. Kraysis provides automatic performance testing services using tools such as Selenium and Jmeter. However, there is always an inherent problem with open source technology because of the lack of technical support. Time is critical for large organizations and they invest into these expensive tools to save their time and increase resilience.”
Pakistan’s software industry still needs some time to grow to where it should have been right now. We do not have large success stories to share with the world and it is largely due to human resource issues in the industry, at both senior and junior levels. To address this particular concern Kraysis has been working with both FAST Lahore and LUMS to generate this awareness among students that ‘If you can’t be a developer, you can be a tester’.
When the dot com bubble burst, people thought the future of IT had also gone up in smoke. It is the responsibility of industry to ensure that they end these misconceptions. Students only take leads from industry trends and it is our responsibility to grow these industries. Quality assurance can prove to be a very lucrative career. “I believe if we, and I mean to address the entrepreneurs of our industry, can be a bit more creative, experimental and bold we just might be able to push this industry into a leading player in the world IT market,” comments Khurram.
For more details, you can visit the company at their website.

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