TESTING - FAQ

rendaoyuan · 发表于 2007-5-29 13:57:27

What makes a good test engineer?

A good test engineer has a 'test to break' attitude, an ability to take the point of view of the customer, a strong desire for quality, and an attention to detail.
Tact and diplomacy are useful in maintaining a cooperative relationship with developers, and an ability to communicate with both technical (developers) and non-technical (customers, management) people is useful.
Previous software development experience can be helpful as it provides a deeper understanding of the software development process, gives the tester an appreciation for the developers' point of view, and reduce the learning curve in
automated test tool programming.
Judgement skills are needed to assess high-risk areas of an application on which to focus testing efforts when time islimited.

What makes a good software QA engineer?

The same qualities a good tester has are useful for a QA engineer.
Additionally, they must be able to understand the entire software development process and how it can fit into the business approach and goals of the organization.
Communication skills and the ability to understand various sides of issues are important.
In organizations in the early stages of implementing QA processes, patience and diplomacy are especially needed.
An ability to find problems as well as to see 'what's missing' is important for inspections and reviews.

What makes a good QA or Test manager?

A good QA, test, or QA/Test (combined) manager should:
be familiar with the software development process
be able to maintain enthusiasm of their team and promote a positive atmosphere, despite what is a somewhat 'negative'
process (e.g., looking for or preventing problems)
be able to promote teamwork to increase productivity
be able to promote cooperation between software, test, and QA engineers
have the diplomatic skills needed to promote improvements in QA processes
have the ability to withstand pressures and say 'no' to other managers when quality is insufficient or QA processes are not being adhered to
have people judgement skills for hiring and keeping skilled personnel
be able to communicate with technical and non-technical people, engineers,managers, and customers.
be able to run meetings and keep them focused

What's the role of documentation in QA?

Critical. (Note that documentation can be electronic, not necessarily paper.)
QA practices should be documented such that they are repeatable.
Specifications, designs, business rules, inspection reports, configurations, code changes, test plans, test cases, bug reports,user manuals, etc. should all be documented.
There should ideally be a system for easily finding and obtaining documents and determining what documentation will have a particular piece of information.
Change management for documentation should be used if possible.

What's the big deal about 'requirements'?

One of the most reliable methods of insuring problems, or failure, in a complex software project is to have poorly documented requirements specifications.
Requirements are the details describing an application's externally-perceived functionality and properties.
Requirements should be clear, complete, reasonably detailed, cohesive, attainable, and testable. A non-testable requirement would be, for example, 'user-friendly' (too subjective).
A testable requirement would be something like 'the user must enter their previously-assigned password to access the application'.
Determining and organizing requirements details in a useful and efficient way can be a difficult effort; different methods are available depending on the particular project.
Many books are available that describe various approaches to this task.
Care should be taken to involve ALL of a project's significant 'customers' in the requirements process.
'Customers' could be in-house personnel or out, and could include end-users, customer acceptance testers, customer contract officers, customer management, future software maintenance engineers, salespeople, etc.
Anyone who could later derail the project if their expectations aren't met should be included if possible.
Organizations vary considerably in their handling of requirements specifications.
Ideally, the requirements are spelled out in a document with statements such as 'The product shall.'.
'Design' specifications should not be confused with 'requirements'; design specifications should be traceable back to the requirements.
In some organizations requirements may end up in high level project plans, functional specification documents, in design documents, or in other documents at various levels of detail.
No matter what they are called, some type of documentation with detailed requirements will be needed by testers in order to properly plan and execute tests.
Without such documentation, there will be no clear-cut way to determine if a Software application is performing correctly.

What's a 'test plan'?
A software project test plan is a document that describes the objectives, scope, approach, and focus of a software testing
effort. The process of preparing a test plan is a useful way to think through the efforts needed to validate the acceptability
of a software product. The completed document will help people outside the test group understand the 'why' and 'how'
of product validation. It should be thorough enough to be useful but not so thorough that no one outside the test group
will read it. The following are some of the items that might be included in a test plan, depending on the particular
project:
Title
Identification of software including version/release numbers
Revision history of document including authors, dates, approvals
Table of Contents
Purpose of document, intended audience
Objective of testing effort
Software product overview
Relevant related document list, such as requirements, design documents, other test plans, etc.
Relevant standards or legal requirements
Traceability requirements
Relevant naming conventions and identifier conventions
Overall software project organization and personnel/contact-info/responsibilties
Test organization and personnel/contact-info/responsibilities
Assumptions and dependencies
Project risk analysis
Testing priorities and focus
Scope and limitations of testing
Test outline - a decomposition of the test approach by test type, feature, functionality, process, system, module, etc. as
applicable
Outline of data input equivalence classes, boundary value analysis, error classes
Test environment - hardware, operating systems, other required software, data configurations, interfaces to other
systems
Test environment setup and configuration issues
Test data setup requirements
Database setup requirements
Outline of system-logging/error-logging/other capabilities, and tools such as screen capture software, that will be used
to help describe and report bugs
Discussion of any specialized software or hardware tools that will be used by testers to help track the cause or source of
bugs
Test automation - justification and overview
Test tools to be used, including versions, patches, etc.
Test script/test code maintenance processes and version control
Problem tracking and resolution - tools and processes
Project test metrics to be used
Reporting requirements and testing deliverables

Software entrance and exit criteria
Initial sanity testing period and criteria
Test suspension and restart criteria
Personnel allocation
Personnel pre-training needs
Test site/location
Outside test organizations to be utilized and their purpose, responsibilties, deliverables, contact persons, and
coordination issues
Relevant proprietary, classified, security, and licensing issues.
Open issues
Appendix - glossary, acronyms, etc.

俺的博客：http://www.51testing.com/?110105,有空去坐坐

[ 本帖最后由 rendaoyuan 于 2007-6-27 11:12 编辑 ]