The main parts of the overall QA plan are:
• Select and prioritize quality goals for this release
• Select QA activities to achieve those goals
• Evaluate how well the activities support the goals
• Plan the actions needed to carry out the activities
The overall QA plan addresses all quality activities. Quality can be achieved by building in better quality from the start, and by testing to find and remove defects. Specific QA activities include: coding preconditions, reviewing design and code, unit testing, integration testing, system testing, beta testing, using analysis tools, and field failure reports, among others. The rest of this paper will focus in on just the system testing activity.
Test planning
Requirements Validation
Designing a system
test suite forces you to deeply understand the requirements. As you understand the requirements more, you will notice incompleteness, ambiguity, and inconsistency. Correcting these problems early can speed up development and reduce the number of late requirements changes.
Testing Coordination
Testing involves many people working together over time. For the team to be effective, their efforts must be coordinated with a written plan.
Test Coverage
Testing only half of a large system is sure to allow thousands of defects into the shipping product. A QA plan is needed to set coverage criteria and evaluate coverage. A
test suite must be carefully designed with the coverage criteria in mind.
Test Automation
Too often, QA teams hope to use
automated testing, but end up stuck with ad-hoc manual
testing. This happens because they never really formalize the requirements, so they must always rely on human judgment to evaluate test outputs. Creating automated test scripts without outlining the
test suite is like writing code without a design document. The following diagram illustrates the gap between ad-hoc
testing and
automated testing, and how systematic
testing with a
test suite bridges that gap.
