Quality assurance – winning formula

QUALITY ASSURANCE – WINNING

FORMULA

Sreeram Kishore Chavali

CHALLENGES

� Balancing business goals and quality criteria

� Get it right first time Vs Get it out on time

� Prevention

� Costs due to bad quality

� Lost customers

People

•Domain experience

•Training

•Customer exposure

•Product Knowledge

•Dev: QA Ratio

Planning

•QA Strategy

•Scope

•Priorities

•Resources

•Risks

•Exit Criteria

•Resource Investment

Process

•Enforcement

•Exceptions

•Tools

•Metrics

IDEAS THAT WORK

INVESTMENT OF RESOURCES

Business Scenario Testing

Automation

Performance, Volume, Stress Testing

Certification

Unit/Reliability Testing

CUSTOMER FOCUS

� Role play: Simulate user scenario

� Data

� Environment

� Workflow

� Validate scenarios for ‘closeness’ to real-life

scenarios

� Crash-Testing of Cars

� Understand Usage

� 80 – 20 rule of functionality

� User Profiles

� Roles, Tasks

AUTOMATION

� Code Coverage

� How many lines of code is covered through

automated tests?

� What is good enough target? 60%?

� What is practical given resources/technology?

� Code Coverage goals for

� Most used features in application

� High risk areas

DEFECT ESCAPE RATE

� Defects found after a product release

� Review all of them

� Identify root cause (5 Whys)

� Set a baseline for release

� Monitor for future releases

� Refine processes/training to keep this stable or

lower

DON’T FORGET BASICS

� Reliable bug tracking system

� Clear instructions in bugs to avoid confusion

� Steps to reproduce

� Severity and priority

� Screenshots

� Instructions to differentiate between bugs and

enhancements

� Impacted customers for defects/enhancements

NEED FOR SPEED

� Keep the train moving

� Bucket features into

� High dev effort, high regression impact (Major

change)

� Low dev effort, high regression impact (Architecture

changes)

� Low dev effort, low regression impact (UI changes)

� High dev effort, low regression impact (new features)

� Plan releases with a mix of features to minimize

overall regression testing effort