QA Process Management - Significance of QA Process

Procedurally, the entire QA cycle consists of three stages:

• Test Case Generation: This stage starts quite early in the SDLC, just after the Design Phase. After the feature requirements are frozen and the design agreed upon, Test Cases are generated. These Test Cases are used for feature verification at the end of Development Phase. However this initial draft may undergo several modifications based on tester and end user feedback. Succinctly put, the test cases must test for expected functionality while also ensuring functioning of software as per expectations. The former
  depends on the captured requirement specifications while the latter is the end users’ expectations from the software. Thus maturity of Test Cases is a long drawn process with need for continuous review, updating, and tracking of updating.
• Test Cycle Planning: This stage involves drawing of schedules and resource allocation charts for testing and their approval by supervisors before execution. It gains significance because effectiveness of the Test Cycle depends on balanced deployment of manpower and testing resources like servers, peripherals etc based on criticality of tested features. A timely release requires planning an efficient test schedule.
• Test Cycle Execution: The actual testing takes place in this stage. Activities may include logging of defect(s)/suggestions encountered in testing, test case modifications, analysis of test logs by leads and generation of QA reports based on findings. The test reports are crucial to the actual release of the software.

Significance of QA Process
QA Phase vindicates the engineering effort and ensures completeness of the generated software before it is released for general availability. It forms a very critical node of the Software Development Lifecycle as can be deduced from the activities enumerated above.

• As its chief objective, the QA Phase brings out the lacunae in requirement gathering, design and development of the software through reporting of defects and suggestion of improvements.
• Beyond its main purpose of catching and reporting bugs in the software, QA ensures compliance of functionality with pre-set expectations.
• It also ensures reliability of software over and above the expected functionality.
• It guarantees scalability, concurrent accessibility and satisfactory performance of software under different usage conditions.
• Specialized testing such as Beta Testing validates that the software not only functions as per the defined specifications but also meets customer expectations and market needs. Receiving and incorporating feedback from end users belonging to different market segments brings in competitiveness in the features also.

The actual testing of an application may be of different types viz Black Box Testing, White Box Testing, Graphics Interface Testing etc depending on the type of application. It can also be carried out either manually by a team of Test Engineers or through the use of Test Automation Tools with minimal manual effort.

Irrespective of these specifics, the QA Phase poses several management challenges as is illustrated through an example (check out in the next posts).

QA Process Management - QA Process Activities

The activities and implications of the QA Phase can vary based on the various software development paradigms in the industry. These are depicted in the table below:

1. Software Product Development - A software product release is preceded by an internal QA cycle wherein Test Engineers from the product development group verify the product functionality against the feature specifications gathered from market sources/sales partners. This is followed by Beta Testing of the product by external users - customers, partners, patrons or volunteering testers.
2. Software Application Development or Software Servicing - In this case three levels of testing may be carried out. The party involved in software servicing or application development carries out the first level of testing at the end of the development phase. At this level the developed application’s functionality is verified strictly against client’s specific requirements. This is typically followed by System Integration and testing of the service or application at the client site, either by test engineers from the servicing project or by test engineers hired by the client. If the client is servicing a customer in turn, testing may be done at the end-customer site also by test engineers hired at the customer end.
3. Software Testing Services - This is a category of software services in which the development partner outsources the complete testing of its product, application or service to a third party. Dedicated teams of Test Engineers at the third party site solely perform testing of the developed software.

The example elucidated in this paper falls in the third category but the challenges that are faced and the solution that has been presented are applicable to the other two categories also.