Quality Assurance: An Overview

Quality Assurance (QA)
An Overview

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Sitecore, Salesforce, Quickbooks and
other cloud software.

What is QA?
Definition:
Quality Assurance (QA) is a way of preventing mistakes or defects in
manufactured products and avoiding problems when delivering
solutions or services to customers.

Goals of QA?
Ensure that the system / code:
● Meets the requirements that guided its design and development
● Works as expected
● Can be implemented with the same characteristics
● Satisfies the needs of stakeholders

Veriﬁcation & Validation
● Validation
○ Build the right product
○ Activities that attempt to determine that customer needs can be met by a
product
● Verification
○ Build the product right
○ Transformational activities that are performed at each step of the product life
cycle
○ Evaluating at each stage of the life cycle to ensure the software meets the
requirements
● Focus
○ Completeness, Consistency, Feasibility, Testability

Software QA - Activities
The two primary Software QA activities:
● Technical Reviews
● Software Testing

Technical Reviews
● A “review” is a meeting where a work product is reviewed by a
small group of people who are qualified to give feedback, find
problems, suggest improvements, and decide and prioritize next
actions.
● Anything can be reviewed: requirements spec, functional spec,
design, code, test plan, user documentation.

Technical Reviews
● Reviews range in formality
○ In the morning, spend some time reviewing your previous day work
○ Informal requests for feedback from peers
○ Pair programming
○ Formal meetings, pre-scheduled, specific invitees, prior preparation
● Problems found during reviews are fixed, resulting in improved
quality
● Reviews are the most effective QA technique, both in terms of cost
and number of defects discovered

Review Meetings
● Review the product – not the producer
● Set an agenda and keep it
● Limit debate and rebuttal
● Enunciate problem areas but don’t try to fix anything
● Take written notes
● Limit the number of participants
● Insist upon advance preparation
● Develop a checklist
● Allocate resources and time schedules
● Conduct meaningful training

Software Testing
● Testing is the process of detecting errors by running the actual software and
verifying that it works as it should
○ Test cases, Expected results, Actual results
● Testing is by far the most popular QA activity (but not the most effective)
● Formal technical reviews are cheaper and more effective than testing, but are
often ignored
● Research has shown that all forms of testing combined usually find less than 60%
of the errors present.

Software Testing Approaches
● Approaches for test case design are generally divided into two broad
categories: Black Box Testing and White Box Testing
● Black Box Testing
○ The tester has limited knowledge of the inner workings of the item being
tested
○ Test cases are based on the specification of the item's external behavior
● White Box Testing
○ The tester has knowledge of the inner workings of the item being tested
○ Test cases are based on the specification of the item's external behavior AND
knowledge of its internal implementation

Software Testing Types
● Unit testing
● Integration testing
● System testing
● Smoke testing
● Sanity testing
● Interface testing
● Regression testing

Unit Testing
● Exercise a specific module in a controlled environment
● Typically involves
○ Scaffolding
○ Stubs and drivers
● Stubs
○ Modules below a unit to mimic behavior of dependent modules
● Drivers
○ Modules above a unit that drive the unit in the same fashion its calling
modules do
● Involves both white box and black box testing

Integration Testing
● After unit testing – put them together to do testing
● Top down or bottom up
● Tester needs to understand the behavior of integrated modules
○ Module hierarchy can help

System Testing
● Execution of the entire system
○ Does it conform to the overall system requirements
○ Depends on the document
● May be simulated
○ Depends on accuracy of the simulator
● Tests
○ Functionality
○ Performance
○ Reliability
○ Usability

Smoke Testing
● Performed after software build to ascertain that the critical functionalities of
the program are working fine
● Executed "before" any detailed functional or regression tests are executed
on the software build
● Purpose is to reject a badly broken application so that the QA team does not
waste time installing and testing the software application
● Test cases only cover the most important functionality or component of the
system

Sanity Testing
● Performed after receiving a software build, with minor changes in code, or
functionality, to ascertain that the bugs have been fixed and no further
issues are introduced due to the changes
● Goal is to determine that the proposed functionality works roughly as
expected
● If sanity test fails, the build is rejected to save the time and costs involved in
a more rigorous testing

Interface Testing
● Also known as GUI (Graphical User Interface) testing
● Process of testing the system's Graphical User Interface of the Application
Under Test
● Involves checking the screens with the controls like menus, buttons, icons,
and all types of bars - toolbar, menu bar, dialog boxes, and windows, etc.
● GUI testing can be done in three ways:
○ Manual Based Testing
○ Record and Replay
○ Record and Replay

Regression Testing
● Check to see that an update does not re-introduce errors
● Check
○ Functionality – typically black box tests
○ Architecture – gray box tests (some knowledge of inner workings)
● Typically a large suite of tests
○ All functionality
○ All changes
● Needs to be automated

QA - Software Development
Planning & Discovery:
Requirements Gathering
● what the client wants
● what it should do
Design & Architecture:
Specifications
● how it will work
● how it’s built
Development & Delivery:
Implement to Reqs /
Specs
● build it
● make sure it works
QA: PM Team
CONFIRMATION
● Verify it works
● Apply test cases
QA: Architecture Team
VERIFICATION
Test it until confident it works
as required / specified.
QA: Client Team
APPROVAL
● Final checks
● Approval
QA: PASS
QA: PASS
QA: FAIL
QA: FAIL
QA

Data & Analytics
Cassandra, DataStax, Kafka, Spark
Customer Experience
Sitecore
Information Systems
Salesforce, Quickbooks, and more
www.anant.us | solutions@anant.us | (855) 262-6826
3 Washington Circle, NW | Suite 301 | Washington, DC 20037

Quality Assurance: An Overview

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