What makes a good QA or Test Manager?

• Be familiar with the software development process

• Able to promote team work to increase productivity
• Have the diplomatic skills needed to promote improvements in QA process
• Able to promote cooperation between software, testing and QA engineers
• Have the ability to withstand pressures and say ‘no’ to others when the Quality is
insufficient or QA processes are not being adhered to
• Be able to run meetings and keep them focused
• Have people judgment skills for hiring and keeping skilled personnel
• Be able to maintain enthusiasm of the team and promote a positive atmosphere,
despite what is a somewhat negative process
• Be able to communicate with technical and non-technical people, engineers,
managers and customers

Role of Documentation in QA

Critical. QA practices should be documented such that they are repeatable.

Specifications, designs, business rules, inspection reports, configurations, code
changes, test plans, test cases, bug reports, user manuals, etc. should all be
documented. There should ideally be a system for easily finding and obtaining
documents and determining what documentation will have a particular piece of
information

What is the big deal about ‘Requirements’?

Requirements are the details describing an application’s functionality and properties.

Requirements should be clear, complete, reasonably detailed, attainable and testable. In
the complex software project environments it is very difficult to develop defect free
applications in the absence of well-defined Requirements.

What if the application has functionality that wasn’t in the requirements?

It may take serious effort to determine if an application has significant unexpected or

hidden functionality, and it would indicate deeper problems in the software development
process. If the application is not necessary for the purpose of the application, it should
be removed, as it may have unknown impacts or dependencies that were not taken into
account by the designer or the customer. Management should be made aware of any
significant added risks as a result of the unexpected functionality.

How to implement QA processes without stifling the productivity?

By implementing QA processes slowly over time, using consensus to reach agreement

on processes, the productivity will improve instead of stifled. Problem prevention will
lessen the need for problem detection, panics and there will be improved focus and less
wasted effort. At the same time processes should be made simple and efficient, promote
automated tracking and reporting, minimize time required in meetings and promote
training as part of the QA process.
Software Development Life Cycle

Initiation of Project In this stage Clients and Business Analysts discuss about
development of the project. BRD (non-technical) prepared
Defining System System analysts will define the system (SRS - technical)
Design the System System will be designed with form or layout of the project with
all the specifications
Develop the System Programmers will develop the code for the project
Testing Testing staff will test the project to make it bug free
Implementation The project will be implemented according to user requirements
Support & Maint S/W Development Company should support the user whenever
they face problems with the System

Features to be tested on an application

Functional Functionality of the application

Limit Length of field according to SRS
Storage Capacity of data storage
Performance Response time of system to single and multi users
Stress How system will respond to when many clients are accessing
Volume Capability to handles large amount of data
Security How secure the system is to unauthorized clients & data security
Recovery How system behaves to power failure and system crash
Reliability How reliable is the system in all aspects and times
Compatibility Flexibility to work in different environments and O/S

Types of Test Cases

Alpha Numeric Performed on Text box or Edit box to verify – case sensitive,
case insensitive, Numeric Equivalence and Numeric Range
Object & properties To capture the properties of the object such as enable or disable
Window image To capture the presence and location of the objects in windows
Region image To capture properties of a particular region or screen
List test case To verify the number of items and their function in list box
Menu test case To verify the function of menus, sub menus and hot keys
Text test case Alpha numeric test case is performed
Clip board To verify the action of buffer
Icon test case To verify the presence of all icons as per SRS

Test Matrix: Tabular form which tells about the test case. How many test cases were
executed, how many passed or failed.

Bug: A mismatch between the actual result and expected result