What is involved in creating a winning team in Quality Assurance?

1. QUALITY ASSURANCE – WINNING
FORMULA
Sreeram Kishore Chavali

2. CHALLENGES
Balancing business goals and quality criteria
Get it right first time Vs Get it out on time
Prevention
Costs due to bad quality
Lost customers

3. IDEAS THAT WORK
People Planning Process
• Domain • QA Strategy • Enforcement
experience • Scope • Exceptions
• Training • Priorities • Tools
• Customer • Resources • Metrics
exposure • Risks
• Product • Exit Criteria
Knowledge
• Resource
• Dev: QA Ratio Investment

4. INVESTMENT OF RESOURCES
Business
Unit/Reliability
Scenario
Testing
Testing
Certification Automation
Performance,
Volume,
Stress
Testing

5. CUSTOMER FOCUS
Role play: Simulate user scenario
Data
Environment
Workflow
Validate scenarios for ‘closeness’ to real-life
scenarios
Crash-Testing of Cars
Understand Usage
80 – 20 rule of functionality
User Profiles
Roles, Tasks

6. AUTOMATION
Code Coverage
How many lines of code is covered through
automated tests?
What is good enough target? 60%?
What is practical given resources/technology?
Code Coverage goals for
Most used features in application
High risk areas

7. DEFECT ESCAPE RATE
Defects found after a product release
Review all of them
Identify root cause (5 Whys)
Set a baseline for release
Monitor for future releases
Refine processes/training to keep this stable or
lower

8. DON’T FORGET BASICS
Reliable bug tracking system
Clear instructions in bugs to avoid confusion
Steps to reproduce
Severity and priority
Screenshots
Instructions to differentiate between bugs and
enhancements
Impacted customers for defects/enhancements

9. NEED FOR SPEED
Keep the train moving
Bucket features into
High dev effort, high regression impact (Major
change)
Low dev effort, high regression impact (Architecture
changes)
Low dev effort, low regression impact (UI changes)
High dev effort, low regression impact (new features)
Plan releases with a mix of features to minimize
overall regression testing effort