Question

300 Spartans

Software Quality, Software requirements, Software project management, Software testing, Software testers

Hi,

I have 18 testers and 2,000 developers. Out of 800 projects I got out 200. I'm thinking push quality back to development; make them show me that they have delivered a good product that works. QA is really QA and not QC. Intense reviews of development's work at various stages versus testing at the end and minor reviews. Development creates quality processes such as peer reviews, code walkthroughs, inspections, and verification test. QA does final release testing only and coordinates UAT.

I want to setup a team with a manager who is in charge of the overall QA processes, resources, and status reporting. Test designer(s) who determines, by project, the technical approach to testing, automation, test techniques, implementations, and testability. Test Analyst who identifies and defines the tests to be run, determines the details of the test, the results of the test, keeps track of changes and regression testing. I want a Test System Administrator who works with development to setup the test environment and resets the environment in a recovery mode. And finally a group of testers to work on multiple projects from scripts provided by the test designers and test analysts. They are a swat team ready to move in an test. Of course a lot of education must be performed to improve the teams testing and technical skills.

How do I get development to work to create the perfect software that works correctly based on the requirements so that my testing does not have to worry about simple things not working but can try to hit the odd areas that might be overlooked?

Obviously there has to be a considerable difference between testers and developers. Testers can’t be developers and vice versa. QA can be involved right from scratch of a product along with the development team – right from customer needs, system architecture, database design, code design and development. Testers can be with developers to perform unit testing as and when a unit is completed and finally the module/product testing and UAT. For their satisfaction developers can perform their own testing before handing it over to QA at all stages using code optimizers, code debuggers and other tools (which are readily available these days with the development tools).