Quality Assurance

Don’t Be Perfect

To be a professional at testing requires a balance between technical and personal strengths. If you want to get ahead in your own career in quality assurance, learn how to turn the pitfalls of test measurement into personal triumphs. You’re a good quality assurance employee: You’re careful, conscientious, practiced in thinking like an end-user, and [...]

In Pursuit of Quality, let’s Call Quality as something else

It is interesting to note many in software profession acknowledge that the phrase “quality” has many meanings – different people at different instants of time paint/experience quality differently. Many admit that objectification of “quality” should be avoided. Yet, it is a rampant practice to portray “quality” as having some universal objective meaning that everyone agrees. [...]

Functional Tests do not belong in a Build Environment

The previous part discussed why a unit test for a class should be written by the developer of that class, and why a functional test should be created by an independent tester. This posting argues that functional tests should not be part of the build process of the product, but instead should be developed and [...]

Practicing Scrum with Outsourced QA Teams

QA and testing are integral parts of software development, and expert Lisa Crispin holds that the team operates more effectively when QA is not outsourced. However, when this isn’t possible, the quality testing group must be involved in daily Scrum meetings and other collaborative practices. This response offers suggestions for working with an outsourced QA [...]

Seven Key Ideas of Real Quality Assurance

Tom Gilb spoke today at the Next Generation testing conference in London, arguing that testing is only part of the larger area of quality assurance. Gilb said that “real quality assurance” consists of seven ideas which are all clearly lean. “They are frugal, effective, non wasteful and early, which are all corner stones of lean”, [...]

Software Development Testing – An Important Step in Assuring the Quality of Software Products

Software development testing is one of the important steps used by software engineers for successful development of any software product. With this, software engineers would have to perform tests or quality assurance manually or used the automated software to make the software bugs free. Software testing is a service that will test your software product [...]

Quality Department Involvement in Project Lifecycle Part 1

This article is intended to be a bridgehead for a wider discussion about the role of quality assurance in software manufacturing processes. I will not try to relate my observations of any particular IT project management methodology (Scrum, Agile, Prince2) or frameworks like ITIL and CMMI. If something does not fit into your system …

Automated Exploratory Testing

Automated Exploratory Testing Ayal Zylberman and Nitzan Shenar What is Exploratory Testing? The most common definition of exploratory testing was provided by James Bach: Exploratory testing is simultaneous learning, test design, and test execution(Exploratory Testing Explained by James Bach, v.1.3) Exploratory testing is distinguished from Scripted testing, which represent the traditional way of performing tests in which the test [...]

Software testing is not software quality assurance!

At least twice a month I have an argument with somebody about differences between software testing and software quality assurance. So I decided to write up a permanent piece about this. What bothers me is that lots of people use these two terms interchangeably without understanding the major differences between them. Even worse, I’ve been [...]

Software Quality Assurance: More than testing

Like many ISV companies, my company has a QA (Quality Assurance) organization. Notionally they are the team that serves as the final defense before the software goes out the door to ensure that it meets whatever standards of quality are appropriate. As a team independent of the developers, we expect them to see clearly what [...]

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