Connecting Practice

The following specific activities could be performed to achieve the development of test specification documents:

1. Develop task satisfying activities and progress tracking system.

2. Identify specific issues or choices outside and inside the situation that should be addressed, confronted, and reinforced in assessing readiness to engage in the undertaking. This usually involves various driving forces, or major influences, that might effect in getting ready to engage in the process. Example: Shortcomings to subject knowledge, experience, and expertise on this area; support; time; etc.

3. Obtain and examine what resources available to engage and devote in the undertaking, such as project objectives, requirements, use cases, etc. Note: Ensure the most effective use of available resources by focusing on the key priorities.

4. Review/Verify objectives, requirements, and/or use cases for correctness and completeness. Use the reasoning process to identify and eliminate incomplete, unclear, incorrect, and ambigious words, phrases, and constructs. Ask “What” most of the time. The intention is to understand the objectives, requirements, and/or use cases and improve their quality for better test design, execution, and results. Note: Arrange meetings at regular intervals with the users for issue clarifications - Issues must be precise and only relevant points should be discussed. Must be very particular in asking inquiries/questions.

5. If appropriate, validate requirements and/or use cases against objectives - Compare requirements and/or use cases to the objectives, if requirements and/or use cases do not belong in the process scope. This includes applying use cases against requirements - Use cases must satisfy requirements. Otherwise, use cases are incomplete.

6. Design, develop, refine, and further the list of functionalities and test cases to fill the gaps in test coverage by:

• reviewing the list of functionalities and test cases by working closely with the requirement’s author - A problem with the list of functionalities and test cases must be redesigned;
• working closely with the user to validate the list of functionalities and test cases - Let users obtain a better understanding of what the deliverable system will be like; and
• reviewing the list of functionalities and test cases by working closely with the developers - Developers understand what they are going to be tested on, and obtain a better understanding of what they are to deliver so they can deliver for success.

This includes:

• developing the full and complete list of functionalities that have to be tested;
• describing the displaying the page(s), navigating on the page(s), and inserting/updating/deleting event actions test cases clearly, concisely, and unambiguously; and developing correct and accurate test data;
• facilitating the team meeting for the list of functionalities and test cases review; and
• Updating the list of functionalities and test cases after review.

7. Use the list of functionalities and test cases for testing.

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I would like to assume that the quality manager had already established his quality management group separately from software development group for overcoming the challenges comes from quality problems mentioned in the first post.

Moreover, in a company that faces a problem of continuous steady growth and in need of quality improvement methods and/or programs to strengthen their software team and help them to improve the quality of their deliverable, the quality manager needs to:

PHASE I: Define and incorporate the quality plan with the project team in parallel work with his/her facilitation in the implementation of the support group’s test works and other groups focusing on developing the project test specifications; finding bugs using regression testing and other forms or types of testing; reporting bugs; and identifying specific project issues. This includes:

• defining clearly the desirable project quality goals and targets with the project sponsor and client;
• defining and integrating an effective and efficient quality process for the entire software development process to reach those goals and targets;
• defining the various roles and responsibilities of an organization-wide quality system;
• communicating readiness, recommendations, technical issues, concerns, exceptions, assumptions, and/or risks;
• Establishing a visible staging, test live (used in user acceptance testing), and live environment;
• Establishing a visible defect or issue tracking and reporting system; and
• Defining and integrating a visible project planning and tracking where each stage of SDLC within project is analyzed to identify the possible risks that a project faces. This includes creating testing strategies (planning and estimate) based on identified risks.

PHASE II: Establish a visible change management that focuses on release (a number of changes are collected together into a release) and configuration (defines baseline and control changes) management.

PHASE III: Measure the effectiveness of the quality process. This includes:

• Monitoring the quality process; and
• changing the quality process as needed to keep it effective.

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A new version of a system is made as fix to some faults or response to changes in its required specifications. In this case, regression testing must rerun as a partial operational requirements after completing the first round of testing.

Moreover, regression testing is time consuming. To limit this, consider the following activities:

1. Generate traceability matrix for optimized test coverage during the requirement phase.
2. Review the test documents and base lining based on impact analysis report. This includes updating traceability matrix.
3. Generate the test repository of test condition, test cases, and/or test scripts for the new requirements. This includes reviewing and removing obsolete test condition, test cases, and/or test scripts from the test repository.
4. Add new test condition, test cases, and/or test scripts to the test repository for enhancing test coverage.
5. Ensure that the incorporation and/or modification of program works properly to promote minimal retesting before the execution.
6. Execute the test repository of test condition, test cases, and/or test scripts. Note any of the techniques below need to be rerun during the undertaking:

• only test case does execute any of the modified parts of the program to establish that the modified parts of the program preserves the desired functionality of the old program;
• only test case has effect on the program output to verify that the new or modified program produces correct output on them;
• only test case has effect on the program output when it is evaluated differently; and
• only test case does execute any of the unmodified parts of the program to verify that its behavior is unchanged and ensure that the fixes made to the program do not cause new errors to occur.

7. Update traceability matrix based on analysis report.
8. Update the test repository of test condition, test cases, and/or test scripts.
9. Continue performing regression testing until all the defects fixed and test cycles are over.

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Thanks to ohskylab of myBlogLog for finding this.

The “How to Report Bugs Effectively” by Simon Tatham, professional and free-software programmer describes a general procedures on how to report bugs effectively on the site and only key tips are listed here as follows:

• It doesn’t work.
• Show me.
• Show me how to show myself.
• Works for me. So what goes wrong?
• So then I tried . . .
• I think the tachyon modulation must be wrongly polarised.
• That’s funny, it did it a moment ago.
• So I loaded the disk on to my Windows . . .

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Poor quality statement can affect one’s behavior to provide project sponsor and client with easy access to quality requirements, solve problems that need to be solved, justify poor quality action and alignment, justify wasted time, and focus on things. Without any clear understanding and idea of what the quality statement are, that one can go in search of things that are broken and his/her goal becomes fixing them. The following are sample activities that one could take to identify and define clearly the desirable quality goals or targets with the project sponsor, client, and team members on a project:

1. Obtaining resources. This includes reviewing project sponsor and client general requirements and supporting documents.
2. Understand the quality needs and/or expectations of the project sponsor and client and input of team members in terms of quality on the project.
3. Determine the desirable quality goals and targets that are consistent with the needs and expectations of the project sponsor and client and input of team members. This includes identifying all the deliverables to be produced, deciding how to best validate their quality, and setting quality criteria and defining quality standards for the deliverables.
4. Define quality statement in ways meaningful to project sponsor, client, and team members.
5. Make sure that quality statement is reviewed and accepted by the project sponsor and client. This includes gaining project sponsor and client agreement with quality statement and re-confirming quality statement with client when changes are approved.

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Poor quality plan can limit quality statement, process, and/or criteria’s success and could even cause the quality statement, process, and/or criteria to fail. By not fixing the problem, one could find further concerns down the line of the quality operation, such as:

• poor procedures to maximize quality control potentials;
• poor project understanding and project team rejection to ideas due to deficient documentation;
• increase of overhead in undertaking quality checks; and
• problems take longer to fix.

Interestingly, some organization don’t want to produce a quality plan due to their belief that developing a quality plan is too complicated and the jargon of quality plan in relation to compliance with quality standards, policies, templates, checklists, criteria, guidelines, metrics, and a range of acronyms are too overwhelming and could leave them confused. This supports the problem and block them to solve their issues and/or concerns.

Viewing the above situations, one needs to find solution and ensure that the desired quality is achieved and that project outputs are fit for purpose; and meet all quality standards, policies, checklists, criteria, guidelines, and metrics in a straightforward and objective way.

The following are sample activities that one could take on to achieve desired quality:

1. Use a quality plan template to describe, structure, develop, organize, and finalize the quality plan with the project team. This includes:

a.) Get the project team ready with the undertaking by communicating the quality process and general requirements and supporting documents for establishing and mutual understanding on project facts. This includes collaborating with the project team for agreement, ideas development, information development, mutual understanding, utilization, and decision making; identifying the quality control tasks of project team needed to control quality; listing the quality assurance activities required to assure quality; and obtaining the project team with tools, training, techniques, and assistance.

b.) Identify and define clearly the desirable quality goals or targets with the project sponsor, client, and team members on a project.

c.) Perform analysis development. This includes thinking about what needs to be done and what could go wrong.

2. Create a cohesive dialog by bring project sponsor and client to a quality review. It could make them more comfortable if they see that quality is being addressed during the start of the project.

3. Expose project sponsor and client to the complexities and potential quality problems and/or issues that usually exist in a project for awareness. This includes ensuring them that you have a mechanism in place to fix the quality problems and/or issues.

4. Execute the quality plan. This includes preparing plan and actions to counter any weaknesses or deficiencies in the quality plan execution.

5. Develop follow up process to allocate fixes to particular people and ensure they actually make the changes. This implies that time must be built into the schedule for rework following review and verification processes.

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Poor quality management can stand in the way of project success. It’s a quality problem that challenges us to change quality assurance and software testing (QAST) practices. Some of the common signs that show up due to quality problems - tend to show up late in the project - are as follows:

• Task rework;
• Lack of project direction;
• Lack of project documentation;
• Higher maintenance and support costs;
• work, Product, service, and/or process return and replacement;
• Missed deadlines and budget;
• Client dissatisfaction;
• Failure mode analysis;
• Complaint resolution;
• Help line support;
• Defect Correction;
• Poor morale;
• Scrap; and
• Etc.

I believe the quality problems have to be solved and the quality management needs to overcome the challenges above. However, some of the things (evidences of existence or limitation) that support the challenges above and keep them going (hinder or blocking you to solve the above challenges) are as follows:

• Act of the will;
• Degree of motivations;
• Commitment, knowledge, and expertise to the QAST practice;
• scope of work and/or improvement (change) desired;
• Adaption to enterprise cultural values, ethics, and abilities to do best and implement the QAST practice effectively;
• Purposeful stability of management;
• Resources; and
• How they respond to the QAST practice chosen.

To avoid the quality problems above, a quality manager must require continual attention to the following activities:

1. Define clearly the desirable quality goals and targets with the project sponsor and client on a project.

a.) Identify and understand the quality needs and/or expectations of the project sponsor and client in terms of quality on the project.
b.) Develop a quality statement as part of the quality plan.

2. Establish a quality process.

Determine, design, define, Develop, organize, manage, implement, and maintain quality control, assurance and improvement mechanisms (quality means for the project), such as: standards like criteria for completeness and correctness, policies, planning, procedures, quality assurance and control processes, reviews, trainings, and tools. These mechanisms will be used on the project to help meet or exceed those quality needs and/or expectations.

3. Measure the effectiveness of the quality process.

a.) Establish performance measures that track achievement of the quality goals. This includes driving team members to perform their job and produce good results.
b.) Track and/or monitor quality goals and the performance measures by identifying the indicators that will tell you whether the required results are being attained.
c.) Analyze the results to determine and prioritize systematic activities for quality. This includes identifying risks and/or problems so steps can be taken in the future to avoid the same concerns.
d.) Share results with the appropriate stakeholders.

4. Monitor the quality process.

Periodically audit the quality process to ensure it is being followed.

5. Change the quality process as needed to keep it effective.

If it is not achieving the results you need, improve it by adjusting processes and/or adopting improved practices to maintain the desired level of quality.

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