Some peoples perception in this software industry that i have interacted seem like Software tester/Quality Assurance Engineer are Quality COP of the products/projects that they seems to be working/testing with.
What do i mean by a Quality COP ?
The answer and reason that i found from few people were little weird where i came to know that Software tester or QA ask too many questions. Few are listed below;
This list goes on…
So i guess these are like the responsibility of every/each software tester/quality assurance engineer to check or validate and assure the software product quality that is been released. So i call them as Quality COP who are responsible to approve and direct whether the product is ready to be delivered/released to the market or may be whether the product is suitable for users to use it or not.
Software tester/Quality assurance engineer (Quality COPS) are responsible to increase the value and life of the product quality being delivered or used by users all over the world as any problem in the product may lead to or affect the lives of people using it.
Now let come to what we mean by Quality ?
Wikipedia describes quality assurance as follows
Quality Assurance is the activity of providing evidence needed to establish confidence among all concerned, that the quality-related activities are being performed effectively. All those planned or systematic actions necessary to provide adequate confidence that a product or service will satisfy given requirements for quality. Quality Assurance is a part and consistent pair of quality management proving fact-based external confidence to customers and other stakeholders that product meets needs, expectations, and other requirements. QA (quality assurance) assures the existence and effectiveness of procedures that attempt to make sure – in advance – that the expected levels of quality will be reached.
Read more on Quality Assurance from wikipedia
So are we (Software tester/Quality Assurance Engineer) responsible for the Product Quality ?
The Software tester/Quality Assurance Engineer test the product and report bugs. Some of these bugs get fixed for the release and few may not be based on many factors like time limitation/project schedule, improper specification etc. Assuring the quality into Products under development is the responsibility of all the members of the quality department team working on the project but sometime/in some case due to some external/internal factor the product is released with known bugs to the market after communicating the problem/risk/issues to project client which they in turn have to decide or plan to make fixes soon for next release cycle or may be as 'Hot fix'/'Patch' for current release version.
The role of the Software tester/Quality Assurance Engineer is to test software, find bugs, report them so that they can be fixed. The Bug Reports should be clear, easy to reproduce, reduce the time to debug for developers and the report should motivate the developers to fix the issue asap. Software tester/QA should focuses on the software product itself and gathers important information regarding what it does and doesn’t do. The process of gathering should include all the teams associated with the product. Talks to all project stakeholder be it Project client, Project manager, Test manager, Sales/Suppost guys, Development team and gather their expectations over the release.
Finally at the end, i would say that the Role of the Tester is to provide qualitative information on the product to the all project stakeholders for the better decisions. So the big challenge here is to provide accurate, comprehensive, and timely information about the product under development.
What do i mean by a Quality COP ?
The answer and reason that i found from few people were little weird where i came to know that Software tester or QA ask too many questions. Few are listed below;
- Are the requirements in place for the product/project ?
- Have we developed the test plan, test procedure that we need to use ?
- Is the test specification metrics and other related documents like SRS, Design Docs, Uses Cases in place ?
- Did we derive the testcase for every modules of the application based on the specs that we received ?
- Did the programmer/developers performed unit tests before sending the build to quality department ?
- Are we suppose to perform testing when the build has been promoted to production few days/hours ago without quality department approval ?
This list goes on…
So i guess these are like the responsibility of every/each software tester/quality assurance engineer to check or validate and assure the software product quality that is been released. So i call them as Quality COP who are responsible to approve and direct whether the product is ready to be delivered/released to the market or may be whether the product is suitable for users to use it or not.
Software tester/Quality assurance engineer (Quality COPS) are responsible to increase the value and life of the product quality being delivered or used by users all over the world as any problem in the product may lead to or affect the lives of people using it.
Now let come to what we mean by Quality ?
Wikipedia describes quality assurance as follows
Quality Assurance is the activity of providing evidence needed to establish confidence among all concerned, that the quality-related activities are being performed effectively. All those planned or systematic actions necessary to provide adequate confidence that a product or service will satisfy given requirements for quality. Quality Assurance is a part and consistent pair of quality management proving fact-based external confidence to customers and other stakeholders that product meets needs, expectations, and other requirements. QA (quality assurance) assures the existence and effectiveness of procedures that attempt to make sure – in advance – that the expected levels of quality will be reached.
Read more on Quality Assurance from wikipedia
So are we (Software tester/Quality Assurance Engineer) responsible for the Product Quality ?
The Software tester/Quality Assurance Engineer test the product and report bugs. Some of these bugs get fixed for the release and few may not be based on many factors like time limitation/project schedule, improper specification etc. Assuring the quality into Products under development is the responsibility of all the members of the quality department team working on the project but sometime/in some case due to some external/internal factor the product is released with known bugs to the market after communicating the problem/risk/issues to project client which they in turn have to decide or plan to make fixes soon for next release cycle or may be as 'Hot fix'/'Patch' for current release version.
The role of the Software tester/Quality Assurance Engineer is to test software, find bugs, report them so that they can be fixed. The Bug Reports should be clear, easy to reproduce, reduce the time to debug for developers and the report should motivate the developers to fix the issue asap. Software tester/QA should focuses on the software product itself and gathers important information regarding what it does and doesn’t do. The process of gathering should include all the teams associated with the product. Talks to all project stakeholder be it Project client, Project manager, Test manager, Sales/Suppost guys, Development team and gather their expectations over the release.
Finally at the end, i would say that the Role of the Tester is to provide qualitative information on the product to the all project stakeholders for the better decisions. So the big challenge here is to provide accurate, comprehensive, and timely information about the product under development.
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