Testing in Software Lifecycle

Testing is a vital part of software development life cycle & can be performed more efficaciously when the testing team is involved as early as possible. A tester should be involved right from requirement analysis until the launch of product. While the involvement of tester in later phases of project lifecycle is apparent, some might argue why is testing team required to be involved in requirements phase?

This statement can be answered correctly if you understand the true role of a tester in requirements phase. Testers are no requirements definer. However, a tester is required to listen to the discussion & gain insights into logic & reasoning of the problems encountered. A tester is required to think like a tester & not just think about the scenarios covered in the discussion, but also to think about the scenarios not covered & raise questions. For example, requirement a is covering b & c type of scenarios, what if, we have a customer x for which there exist a scenario y. How will such a situation be handled. By raising such questions to the experts, a tester can ignite discussions on totally untouched areas that might have severely impacted the project timelines if discovered at a later phase.


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HP Quality Center

HP Quality Center 10.0 is a web based complete end-to-end test management tool. It helps us in managing the project cycles, requirements, resources, test cases, defects & reporting.

There is a separate module to manage each of the activities.

Management: This module can be used to define releases & cycles within a project

Requirements: This module is used to manage the requirements for a project. Each requirement can be linked to test cases in test plan module which in turn will give us real time status of testing progress.

Test Plan: This module is used during the test planning phase. A tester can write or upload test cases in this module, allocate test cases to a particular release or cycle defined in Management module, ensure proper test coverage by linking test cases to requirements.

Test Resources: This module enables you to manage test resources in a hierarchical tree structure. The test resources can be associated with tests.

Test Lab: This module comes into play during test execution phase. In test execution phase, the test lead can assign test cases to each of the tester to execute. The testers, after executing the test cases can update the result of test case to passed, failed etc. If a test case is failed a defect need to be raised in defect module. The defect in the defect module can be linked to failed test case in this module.

Defects: As the name says, all failed test cases should have a defect assigned to it. A defect is raised by tester & assigned to developer for fixing. Defect then goes through its usual defect life cycle & finally closed by tester after successfully testing.

Dashboard: This module contains all the reporting capabilities of QC. You can generate virtually any graph that you can think of related to testing projects. This module integrates analysis menu in requirements, test plan, test lab & defects modules. You can generate graphs, standard reports, excel reports & dashboard pages.

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