Software QA/Testing Technical FAQs

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What are the responsibilities of a QA engineer?
Let's say, an engineer is hired for a small software company's QA role, and there is no QA team. Should he take responsibility to set up a QA infrastructure/process, testing and quality of the entire product? No, because taking this responsibility is a classic trap that QA people get caught in. Why? Because we QA engineers cannot assure quality. And because QA departments cannot create quality.
What we CAN do is to detect lack of quality, and prevent low-quality products from going out the door. What is the solution? We need to drop the QA label, and tell the developers that they are responsible for the quality of their own work. The problem is, sometimes, as soon as the developers learn that there is a test department, they will slack off on their testing. We need to offer to help with quality assessment, only.

The system runs at Intranet environment and it has a security system. The security system's architecture designed on User and Role system. There are only one system Role and that is System Amdin Role and user can also create as many role as he needs. Role is attached with an user and a user can login to the system if he has a role. Role mainly instanciate the permissions of resources in that role. And the system has about 100 system defined resources and there may be some user-defined resources also.
So, in this environment, for testing the security system. how to develop test plan and test script ?

Assume that roles are generated by combining logical options (can edit this section, can only generate reports here, can not access this).
Start by witing down the different activities that each role can access. Then write down the different levels for each activity.
Now create a pair-wise combination of them. I won't explain pair-wise testing as you can Google for it and get better answers there.
Use pair-wise testing to create special roles that are used in testing. If you know that there are certain default roles, make sure to use them.
Then generate a list of tasks that can be preformed on the system (don't concern yourself with roles at this point).
Write each of these tasks down and put them into a database (If you have no other option, use MySQL and OpenOffice to create your shared database).
Then create another table that contains your roles. Create a third table that takes the index values of the first table and the index values of the second table (the intersections) and there you can determine if the scenario can be tested or not using that role. (this can also be done in a spreadsheet with scenarios on the left side and rols across the top).
Then run the tests that can be run.

What is the ratio of developers and testers?
The ratio of developers and testers is not a fixed one, but depends on what phase of the software development life cycle the project is in. When a product is first conceived, organized, and developed, this ratio tends to be 10:1, 5:1, or 3:1, i.e. heavily in favor of developers. In sharp contrast, when the product is near the end of the software development life cycle, just before alpha testing begins, this ratio tends to be 1:1, or even 1:2, in favor of testers.

What is the difference between V-model and water fall model?

V-model is used for the project based, here the spec is not freezed, the devolpement and QA process goes parellel.
Water fall model is used for the product based projects, here the spec is defined and freezed in the starting, Once the developement completes the coding, testers will start testing the product.

Which of these roles are the best and most popular?
In testing, Tester roles tend to be the most popular. The less popular roles include the roles of System Administrator, Test/QA Team Lead, and Test/QA Managers.

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