Testing is not just limited to find bugs but has a wider scope. Since testing is also standardized as of development it too had a life cycle: Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC).
QA has an equal role as of developer or analyst or any other position and plays a major part in software development.
Software Testing Life Cycle is a sequence of activities conducted during the testing process to ensure software quality goals are met.
Process of STLC Model
Requirement Analysis
QA interacts with various stakeholders like Client, Business Analyst, System Analyst, Technical Lead/ Development Manager to understand the requirements in detail to develop the project.
QA lead will address this meeting and gather all the business requirements. This meeting will usually happen before the project kick starts. The client will provide all high-level requirements and it’s the tester’s duty to derive all positive and negative scenarios from these requirements.
Test Planning
A test plan is prepared which will have every activity to deliver a project back to the client by satisfying and testing thoroughly all the requirements given by the client.
Test planning is a document that contains the plan related to all testing activities which need to be done to deliver a quality product. The senior QA manager or Test lead will prepare the test plan and determines strategy along with efforts and cost estimates for the project.
The focus of the Test Plan is
What to test
What are all the high-level business requirements and how we are going to test them? e.g. Form functionality, Tab functionality.
What cannot be tested
As part of the QA plan, we have to clearly mention what cannot be tested. e.g. After giving a payment link it redirects to some third-party pay-pal page that is not in our control. So we have to point out that we cannot valid transaction purchase payments.
Tools used for testing
The environment or infrastructure which is required needs to specify. To maintain all defects and all test cases we need Jira or ALM, Bugzilla for defect tracking, Selenium for automation.
Resources
Resource planning and determining roles and responsibilities.
Test Duration
How much time we need to complete depends on the development and goes on a story basis in the sprint process. Development and testing need to happen simultaneously.
Risk and contingencies plan
Risks associated with testing like infrastructure issues, environmental issues, resources may not be available on time all these we should have to mention in this test plan.
Test Case Development
The testing team writes down all test cases and automation scripts if applicable for that specific sprint. When the development team starts working on user stories, testers should have to start writing test cases. By looking at stories tester have to think Out Of Box and write all positive and negative test cases.
Consider preparing test data along with test cases.
Test cases are reviewed by peer members or QA lead.
Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM)
The RTM is an industry accepted format for tracking requirements where each test cases is mapped with the requirements using this RTM. We can track backward and forward traceability.
Test Environment Setup
Decides the software and hardware conditions under which a work product is tested. And can be done in parallel with the test case developmental process. The testing team may not be involved in this activity if the development team provides the test environment. A generic thing may not repeat for every story and needs to be discussed in sprint grooming.
Test Execution
The test execution phase will starts once the build is ready. The testers will carry out the testing based on the test plans and the test cases prepared. Bugs are reported to the development team. The development team resolves the bugs and the system is retested to ensure that it is bug-free and ready to go live.
Start executing all the test cases which we prepared for testing the functionality which got developed for that particular story or particular release and document what are all the bugs raised while testing and submit to the development team.
Test Closure Activities
Once the release is completed or after the product is delivered.
Ensure Test completion: Check after a product is live, verify 100% test cases are passed means verify all the test cases is mapped with a requirement or not, if not track what are all missing so that we can deliver it in next release.
Hand over test artifacts: Collection of test completion matrices. Once the complete project is done, we may have some automation tests as well, we have to document what tests are automated so that when it comes under maintenance they can revive these artifacts for clarifications.
Project retrospective: It is a meeting in which we have to discuss what exactly we did in the previous sprint where there is any push-back so should take action items and all mistakes we should not repeat all together get documented by gathering as a team.
Archive test work product: Save our test plan, test data, and test closure report.
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