“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 that the project has been developed with high quality and at least meets customer’s expectations.

QA does not assure quality, rather it creates and ensures the processes are being followed to assure quality. QC does not control quality, rather it measures quality. QC measurement results can be utilized to correct/modify QA processes which can be successfully implemented in new projects as well.

Quality control activities are focused on the deliverable itself. Quality assurance activities are focused on the processes used to create the deliverable. QA and QC are both powerful techniques which can be used to ensure that the deliverables meet high quality expectations of customers.

E.g.: we have to use an Issue tracking system to log the bugs during testing a web application. QA would include defining the standard for adding a bug and what all details should be there in a bug, like summary of the issue, where it is observed, steps to reproduce the bugs, screenshots etc. This is a process to create deliverable ‘bug–report’. When a bug is actually added in issue tracking system based on these standards then that bug report is our deliverable.

Now, suppose some time at later stage of project we realize that adding ‘probable root cause’ to the bug based on tester’s analysis would provide some more insight to the Dev team, then we will update our pre-defined process and finally it will be reflected in our bug reports as well. This is how QC gives inputs to QA to further improve the QA.

Following is an example of a real life scenario for QA / QC:

QA Example:

Suppose our team has to work on completely new technology for upcoming project. Our team members are new to the technology. So for that we need to create a plan for training the team members in the new technology. Based on our knowledge we need to collect pre-requisites like understanding documents, design of the product along with the documents etc. and share with the team, which would be helpful while working on the new technology and even would be useful for any new comer in the team. This is QA.

QC Example:

Once the training is done how we can make sure that the training was successfully done for all the team members? For this purpose we will have to collect statistics e.g. number of marks the trainees got in each subject and minimum number of marks expected after completing the training. Also we can make sure that everybody has taken training in full by verifying the attendance record of candidates. If the number of marks of candidates are up to the expectations of the trainer/evaluators then we can say that the training is successful otherwise we will have to improve our process in order to deliver high quality training.

Hope this explains the difference between QA and QC.

****************
About Author: Meenal is Team Lead specialized in overall QA process for performing functional, data testing, performance testing and security testing for various projects. She is also worked on Waterfall and Agile models.

I would like all of you to please join this discussion and add more valuable points to it. Thanks.

---------------------
I just wanted to thank you for subscribing to SoftwareTestingHelp.com. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your success!

As always, I appreciate your valuable comments. Visit below link to post your comment:
Does Quality Assurance Remove Need for Quality Control?

Thank you so much! ---------------------
Recommended: TestLodge - Online test case management tool - Web based test case management software allowing you to manage your test plans, requirements, test cases and test runs with ease.

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.

The simplest thing to follow all kind of documentation is to involve a person in project from kick off phase who understands the project dynamics, domain, objective, and technology. And who else better than a QA person for this (of course there are technical writers present to do this – but considering a general scenario of small companies where technical writers are not present).

To achieve this goal of testing and documentation I feel we need to focus on some points.

Here are the top 10 tips to help you achieve your software testing documentation goal:

1. QA should involve at the very first phase of project so that QA and Documentation work hand in hand.

2. Process defined by QA should follow by technical people, this helps remove most of the defects at very initial stage.

3. Only creating and maintaining software testing templates is not enough, force people to use them.

4. Don’t only create and leave document, Update as and when required.

5. Change requirement is important phase of project don’t forget to add them in the list.

6. Use version controlling for everything. This will help you manage and track your documents easily.

7. Make defect remediation process easier by documenting all defects. Make sure to include clear description of defect, reproduce steps, affected area and details about author while documenting any defect.

8. Try to document what is required for you to understand your work and what you will need to produce to your stakeholders whenever required.

9. Use standard template for documentation. Like any excel sheet template or doc file template and stick to it for all your document needs.

10. Share all project related documents at single location, accessible to every team member for reference as well to update whenever required.

I am not saying that by applying above steps you will get sudden results. I know this change won’t happen in a day or two, but at least we can start so that these changes start happening slowly.

After all “the documentation needs documentation”.  Isn’t it?

Share your tips. How you maintain software testing documents related to your project?

This is a guest article by ‘Tejaswini patil’. She is working with an E-learning organization as an Associate Manager QA.

---------------------
I just wanted to thank you for subscribing to SoftwareTestingHelp.com. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your success!

As always, I appreciate your valuable comments. Visit below link to post your comment:
10 Tips to Help You Achieve Your Software Testing Documentation Goal

Thank you so much! ---------------------
Recommended: TestLodge - Online test case management tool - Web based test case management software allowing you to manage your test plans, requirements, test cases and test runs with ease.

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.

Similarly, if a product must have quality, every stakeholder from customer, requirements, design, development, testing and support must have equal responsibility towards it.

However, some organizations who are not serious about testing or fake their seriousness about testing hire a tester for every project to make a tester scapegoat when any of their customers find a bug. These testers who are made to feel themselves as Quality God’s start feeling guilty about the idea of missing a bug and take responsibility for missing a bug.

This happens because most testers have a screwed up understanding of what testing is. They carry an idea of testing as improving quality while it is not improving quality but finding information about quality.

By reporting bugs – the quality by itself isn’t improving unless someone cares to fix it. Now, if you have been working as testers you would know that many times by trying to fix a bug, 2 or more new bugs are introduced. So, probably, each bug a tester reports and each bug being fixed and new springing up, the quality might be decreasing.

I must also admit that lesser bugs doesn’t necessarily mean good quality. Jerry Weinberg, a living legend of software testing who was the first person to start a testing team way back in 1960’s defines “Quality is value to some person who matters” and then Michael Bolton expanded it to “It is a testers responsibility to find out who matters and what matters to them”. So fantastic.

Here are some of the problems that happen if testers continue to think of themselves as Quality God’s

Issues with developers: Testers start seeing developers as demons who are spoiling quality and get into issues with them. This impacts the performance of the whole team and developers start disrespecting the testing community itself. So, testers who cause this problem, not only spoil their name but all our names as well.

Its like batsmen accusing of bowlers to have given a lot of runs. If a cricket team has to function well then bowlers and batsmen have to work together to make the team win. Sometimes batsmen fail to perform and other times bowlers. You may want to think of yourselves as humans just as developers and both of you are equally capable of making mistakes. However, focusing on your skills of thinking can help the team’s success.

Guilty of missing a bug: When a bug is missed, the tester feels all alone responsible for missing it. Such testers don’t think they are a part of the entire team, which missed it. I am talking about all stakeholders responsible for missing it.

If 4 runs is needed of the last ball and a batsman fails to score, is the batsman responsible for the loss of the team?

Failing to learn: A pattern among all those testers who assume themselves as God’s of quality fail to learn. The feeling of being THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE makes their mind to think they have learned almost everything and everything they have learned is right.

Let me take this open bet: 90% of the testers I have met by traveling to all places in India haven’t read a testing book yet despite several years of experience. You would hardly find a developer who has not read a development related book but testers think everything about testing online is good and fine.

This surprises me – testers don’t test their own learning. How can I believe that they can test even half as good as they claim?

The change

Now, I am not forcing you to change but let me tell you that none of the respected testers of the world have an idea about themselves as God’s of quality or being the only person responsible for quality. You may want to take a clue from it and change but it is you who is causing the change and not me.

If you are willing to change a little further, you may want to consider thinking:

- Testing as providing information about quality
- Developers as sources of information
- Test Coverage as a key factor for success of a test team
- Success of the entire team is the success of a test team
- Missing bugs is not always a tester’s fault
- Testers are humans and humans are fallible ( they fail )
- Testers are as imperfect as developers
- Helping other testers to get the ideas right after you have got it

About Author:
Pradeep is a renowned tester, thinker and thought leader and an international speaker in software testing and problem solving. He writes a popular blog Tester Tested! and tests, coaches, consults, manages testing and testers.

---------------------
I just wanted to thank you for subscribing to SoftwareTestingHelp.com. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your success!

As always, I appreciate your valuable comments. Visit below link to post your comment:
Fake God of Quality versus True Humans – Who is responsible for Software Quality?

Thank you so much! ---------------------
Recommended: TestLodge - Online test case management tool - Web based test case management software allowing you to manage your test plans, requirements, test cases and test runs with ease.

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.

---------------------
I just wanted to thank you for subscribing to SoftwareTestingHelp.com. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your success!

As always, I appreciate your valuable comments. Visit below link to post your comment:
Types of Risks in Software Projects

Thank you so much! ---------------------
Recommended: TestLodge - Online test case management tool - Web based test case management software allowing you to manage your test plans, requirements, test cases and test runs with ease.

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:

• Winrunner
• QTP
• AdventNet QEngine
• Regression Tester
• vTest
• Watir
• Selenium
• actiWate
• Rational Functional Tester
• SilkTest

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.

---------------------
I just wanted to thank you for subscribing to SoftwareTestingHelp.com. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your success!

As always, I appreciate your valuable comments. Visit below link to post your comment:
Regression Testing with Regression Testing Tools and methods

Thank you so much! ---------------------
Recommended: TestLodge - Online test case management tool - Web based test case management software allowing you to manage your test plans, requirements, test cases and test runs with ease.

• 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.

These are some quality definitions from different perspective. Now lets see how can one measure some quality attributes of product or application.
Following factors are used to measure software development quality. Each attribute can be used to measure the product performance. These attributes can be used for Quality assurance as well as Quality control. Quality Assurance activities are oriented towards prevention of introduction of defects and Quality control activities are aimed at detecting defects in products and services.

Reliability
Measure if product is reliable enough to sustain in any condition. Should give consistently correct results.
Product reliability is measured in terms of working of project under different working environment and different conditions.

Maintainability
Different versions of the product should be easy to maintain. For development its should be easy to add code to existing system, should be easy to upgrade for new features and new technologies time to time. Maintenance should be cost effective and easy. System be easy to maintain and correcting defects or making a change in the software.

Usability
This can be measured in terms of ease of use. Application should be user friendly. Should
be easy to learn. Navigation should be simple.
The system must be:

• Easy to use for input preparation, operation, and interpretation of output.
• Provide consistent user interface standards or conventions with our other frequently used systems.
• Easy for new or infrequent users to learn to use the system.

Portability
This can be measured in terms of Costing issues related to porting, Technical issues related to porting, Behavioral issues related to porting.

Correctness
Application should be correct in terms of its functionality, calculations used internally and the navigation should be correct. This means application should adhere to functional requirements.

Efficiency
To Major system quality attribute. Measured in terms of time required to complete any task given to the system. For example system should utilize processor capacity, disk space and memory efficiently. If system is using all the available resources then user will get degraded performance failing the system for efficiency. If system is not efficient then it can not be used in real time applications.

Integrity or security
Integrity comes with security. System integrity or security should be sufficient to prevent unauthorized access to system functions, preventing information loss, ensure that the software is protected from virus infection, and protecting the privacy of data entered into the system.

Testability
System should be easy to test and find defects. If required should be easy to divide in different modules for testing.

Flexibility
Should be flexible enough to modify. Adaptable to other products with which it needs interaction. Should be easy to interface with other standard 3rd party components.

Reusability
Software reuse is a good cost efficient and time saving development way. Different code libraries classes should be generic enough to use easily in different application modules. Dividing application into different modules so that modules can be reused across the application.

Interoperability
Interoperability of one system to another should be easy for product to exchange data or services with other systems. Different system modules should work on different operating system platforms, different databases and protocols conditions.

Applying above quality attributes standards we can determine whether system meets the requirements of quality or not. As specified above all these attributes are applied on QA and QC process so that tester or customer also can find quality of application or system.

---------------------
I just wanted to thank you for subscribing to SoftwareTestingHelp.com. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your success!

As always, I appreciate your valuable comments. Visit below link to post your comment:
What are the Quality attributes?

Thank you so much! ---------------------
Recommended: TestLodge - Online test case management tool - Web based test case management software allowing you to manage your test plans, requirements, test cases and test runs with ease.