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).