WISQA.org - August 2002

Wisconsin Information Systems
Quality Assurance

Question #1: How to get testing out of the way and in stages so there isn't crunch-testing time? Managing changes so that they are coming in for steady stream of testing and not all at once at the time of testing freeze.

Note: For this question, there were three breakout groups that addressed the same topic.

Answers: The project manager needs to understand and BUY-IN to the concept of functional testing. Testing needs to be planned and incorporated into the project plan early on.

QA should be involved up front during project planning and estimating.

Requirements should be reviewed, and QA should participate in the reviews. Results in better requirements (which saves costs and time) and QA has a 'heads up' regarding the project.

Should be a separation of duties between business analysts (doing requirements) and Testers. Otherwise there can be conflicting priorities.

Should have some pre-defined measures as to how much testing should be done.

The project plan should identify test stages so there are no surprises.

Need to set and manage expectations regarding schedule / time needed for testing and trade-offs between quality, time and the risks involved with shortcutting testing.

IT should always tell the user if there are known problems with the product.

Project team should have weekly meetings to gauge progress of testing and to establish priorities.

Product should be released and testing in stages. Testing stagse as they are developed may alter the sequence in which the product is released. The first stage should be the underlying framework, i.e. the database. Need to sequence the releases in a way that makes sense and that testing can be performed on the incremental products.

Regression test for pieces that have been tested in previous releases.

Early preparation of test plans.

Towards the end of the project automate tests. The tests that are run most often, when the product is fairly stable.

For the remaining questions - each topic was addressed by ONE breakout group and shared with the larger group.