Software QA/Testing Technical FAQs

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How to establish QA Process in an organization?
1.CURRENT SITUATION
The first thing you should do is to put what you currently do in a piece of paper in some sort of a flowchart diagram. This will allow you to analyze what is being currently done.
2.DEVELOPMENT PROCESS STAGE
Once you have the "big picture", you have to be aware of the current status of your development project or projects. The processes you select will vary depending if you are in early stages of developing a new application (i.e.: developing a version 1.0), or maintaining an existing application (i.e.: working on release 6.7.1).
3. PRIORITIES
The next thing you need to do is identify the priorities of your project, for example: - Compliance with industry standards - Validation of new functionality (new GUIs, etc) - Security - Capacity Planning ( You should see "Effective Methods for Software Testing" for more info). Make a list of the priorities, and then assign them values of (H)igh, (M)edium and (L)ow.
4. TESTING TYPES
Once you are aware of the priorities, focus on the High first, then Medium, and finally evaluate whether the Low ones need immediate attention.
Based on this, you need to select those Testing Types that will provide coverage for your priorities. Example of testing types:
- Functional Testing
- Integration Testing
- System Testing
- System-to-System Testing (for testing interfaces)
- Regression Testing
- Load Testing
- Performance Testing
- Stress Testing
Etc.

5. WRITE A TEST PLAN
Once you have determined your needs, the simplest way to document and implement your process is to elaborate a "Test Plan" for every effort that you are engaged into (i.e.: for every release).
For this you can use generic Test Plan templates available in the web that will help you brainstorm and define the scope of your testing:
- Scope of Testing (defects, functionality, and what will be and will not be tested).
- Testing Types (Functional, Regression, etc).
- Responsible people
- Requirements traceability matrix (match test cases with requirements to ensure coverage)
- Defect tracking
- Test Cases
DURING AND POST-TESTING ACTIVITIES
Make sure you keep track of the completion of your testing activities, the defects found, and that you comply with an exit criteria prior to moving to the next stage in testing (i.e. User Acceptance Testing, then Production Release).
Make sure you have a mechanism for:
- Reporting
- Test tracking

What is software testing?
1) Software testing is a process that identifies the correctness, completenes, and quality of software. Actually, testing cannot establish the correctness of software. It can find defects, but cannot prove there are no defects.
2) It is a systematic analysis of the software to see whether it has performed to specified requirements. What software testing does is to uncover errors however it does not tell us that errors are still not present.

Any recommendation for estimation how many bugs the customer will find till gold release?

Answer1:
If you take the total number of bugs in the application and subtract the number of bugs you found, the difference will be the maximum number of bugs the customer can find.
Seriously, I doubt you will find any sort of calculations or formula that can answer your question with much accuracy. If you could refernce a previous application release, it might give you a rough idea. The best thing to do is insure your test coverage is as good as you can make it then hope you've found the ones the customer might find.
Remember Software testing is Risk Management!

Answer2:
For doing estimation :
1.)Find out the Coverage during testing of ur software and then estimate keeping in mind 80-20 principle.
2.)You can also look at the deepening of your test cases e.g. how much unit level testing and how much life cycle teting have you performed (Believe that most of the bugs from customer comes due to real use of lifecycle in the software)
3.)You can also refer the defect density from earlier releases of the same product line.
by doing these evaluation you can find out the probability of bugs at an approximately optimum estimation.

Answer3:
You can look at the customer issues mapping from previous release (If you have the same product line) to the current release ,This is the best way of finding estimation for gold release of migration of any product.Secondly, till gold release most of the issues comes from various combination of installation testing like cross-platform,i18 issues,Customization,upgradation and migration.
So ,these can be taken as a parameter and then can estimation be completed.

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