Entries Tagged 'Quality assurance' ↓
September 19th, 2011 — Quality assurance, Questions & answers, Testing Concepts
This is a guest post by Meenal Balajiwale.
“If QA (Quality Assurance) is done then why do we need to perform QC (Quality Control)?”, this thought may come to our mind some times and looks a valid point too. This means if we have followed all the pre-defined processes, policies and standards correctly and completely then why do we need to perform a round of QC?
In my opinion QC is required after QA is done. While in ‘QA’ we define the processes, policies, strategies, establish standards, developing checklists etc. to be used and followed through out the life cycle of a project. And while in QC we follow all those defined processes, standards and policies to make sure Continue reading →
April 18th, 2010 — Basics of Software testing, Manual Testing, Quality assurance, Testing best practices
Note: If you missed the first part of this post please read it: Why Documentation is important in testing?
As I mention in my earlier post, in general, understanding about software testing documentation is “It can be done only by the person who has free time”. We need to change this mindset, and then only we can leverage documentation power on our projects.
It’s not that we don’t know how to do the documentation right. We just don’t think it’s important.
Everyone must have standard templates for all the kinds of documentation starting from Test strategy, test Plan, Test cases, and Test data to Bug report. These are just to follow some standards (CMMI, ISO etc.) but, when it comes to actual implementation how many of these documents are really used by us? We just need to synchronize our quality process with documentation standards and other process in an organization.
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September 8th, 2009 — Career in software Testing, Quality assurance, Tester vs Developer
This article is by Pradeep Soundararajan, our guest author at SoftwareTestingHelp.
Many thousands of software testers I came across had the notion that they are into testing and are solely responsible for quality. Some of them even think that being a tester also empowers them as a God of Quality for the product.
The questions I ask you is: Is this for good?
Here is what I think and would like to see you considering these ideas.
Quality is everyone’s responsibility and not just a tester out there or thousands of them out there. If your family has to be happy, you can’t assign a person in your family as ensurer of happiness and catch the ensurer responsible if something goes wrong. If a family has to be happy forever, it has to happen with everyone participating and facilitating it.
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December 17th, 2007 — Basics of Software testing, Quality assurance, Test strategy
Are you developing any Test plan or test strategy for your project? Have you addressed all risks properly in your test plan or test strategy?
As testing is the last part of the project, it’s always under pressure and time constraint. To save time and money you should be able to prioritize your testing work. How will prioritize testing work? For this you should be able to judge more important and less important testing work. How will you decide which work is more or less important? Here comes need of risk-based testing.
What is Risk?
“Risk are future uncertain events with a probability of occurrence and a potential for loss”
Risk identification and management are the main concerns in every software project. Effective analysis of software risks will help to effective planning and assignments of work.
In this article I will cover what are the “types of risks”. In next articles I will try to focus on risk identification, risk management and mitigation.
Risks are identified, classified and managed before actual execution of program. These risks are classified in different categories.
Categories of risks:
Schedule Risk:
Project schedule get slip when project tasks and schedule release risks are not addressed properly.
Schedule risks mainly affect on project and finally on company economy and may lead to project failure.
Schedules often slip due to following reasons:
- Wrong time estimation
- Resources are not tracked properly. All resources like staff, systems, skills of individuals etc.
- Failure to identify complex functionalities and time required to develop those functionalities.
- Unexpected project scope expansions.
Budget Risk:
- Wrong budget estimation.
- Cost overruns
- Project scope expansion
Operational Risks:
Risks of loss due to improper process implementation, failed system or some external events risks.
Causes of Operational risks:
- Failure to address priority conflicts
- Failure to resolve the responsibilities
- Insufficient resources
- No proper subject training
- No resource planning
- No communication in team.
Technical risks:
Technical risks generally leads to failure of functionality and performance.
Causes of technical risks are:
- Continuous changing requirements
- No advanced technology available or the existing technology is in initial stages.
- Product is complex to implement.
- Difficult project modules integration.
Programmatic Risks:
These are the external risks beyond the operational limits. These are all uncertain risks are outside the control of the program.
These external events can be:
- Running out of fund.
- Market development
- Changing customer product strategy and priority
- Government rule changes.
These are all common categories in which software project risks can be classified. I will cover in detail “How to identify and manage risks” in next article.
August 29th, 2007 — Automation Testing, Quality assurance, Testing Interview questions, Testing Tips and resources, Types of testing
What is Regression Software Testing?
Regression means retesting the unchanged parts of the application. Test cases are re-executed in order to check whether previous functionality of application is working fine and new changes have not introduced any new bugs.
This is the method of verification. Verifying that the bugs are fixed and the newly added feature have not created in problem in previous working version of software.
Why regression Testing?
Regression testing is initiated when programmer fix any bug or add new code for new functionality to the system. It is a quality measure to check that new code complies with old code and unmodified code is not getting affected.
Most of the time testing team has task to check the last minute changes in the system. In such situation testing only affected application area in necessary to complete the testing process in time with covering all major system aspects.
How much regression testing?
This depends on the scope of new added feature. If the scope of the fix or feature is large then the application area getting affected is quite large and testing should be thoroughly including all the application test cases. But this can be effectively decided when tester gets input from developer about the scope, nature and amount of change.
What we do in regression testing?
- Rerunning the previously conducted tests
- Comparing current results with previously executed test results.
Regression Testing Tools:
Automated Regression testing is the testing area where we can automate most of the testing efforts. We run all the previously executed test cases this means we have test case set available and running these test cases manually is time consuming. We know the expected results so automating these test cases is time saving and efficient regression testing method. Extent of automation depends on the number of test cases that are going to remain applicable over the time. If test cases are varying time to time as application scope goes on increasing then automation of regression procedure will be the waste of time.
Most of the regression testing tools are record and playback type. Means you will record the test cases by navigating through the AUT and verify whether expected results are coming or not.
Example regression testing tools are:
Most of the tools are both Functional as well as regression testing tools.
Regression Testing Of GUI application:
It is difficult to perform GUI(Graphical User Interface) regression testing when GUI structure is modified. The test cases written on old GUI either becomes obsolete or need to reuse. Reusing the regression testing test cases means GUI test cases are modified according to new GUI. But this task becomes cumbersome if you have large set of GUI test cases.
August 12th, 2007 — Basics of Software testing, ISO standards, Quality assurance
First in brief know what is Quality? Quality can be define in different manner. Quality definition may differ from person to person. But finally there should be some standards. So Quality can be defined as
- Degree of excellence – Oxford dictionary
- Fitness for purpose – Edward Deming
- Best for the customer’s use and selling price – Feigenbaum
- The totality of characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs – ISO
How a Product developer will define quality – The product which meets the customer requirements.
How Customer will define Quality – Required functionality is provided with user friendly manner.
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