Quality Assurance Procedures

[joejld1]

Hey guys

This question is for those with quality assurance experience. I am applying for a software QA job and I'm wondering if anyone can shed some light on what procedures are involved when QA analyzing a software product, mainly what they call quality assurance procedures.

Many thanks

 

[Rage187]

We start off w/ a smoke test to make sure that it will even load up.

We either than write test cases for the bug fixes/feature requests, or our team lead will have them ready to go: She usually makes test cases built off the PRD.

We then run the test cases, any bugs we find we put into a bug tracking program, we use Test Track Pro, aka TTP.

We keep doing test cases until we have gone through them all; while we are testing the engineers are usually readying another build w/ the fixes for the latest bugs we found.

Once we have verified that all the bugs and features made it into a clean build we do a regression test on everything.



Enjoy!

Ive been doing SQA for the last 6months and its kinda fun. You have to think like a tester though.

Also read some books on testing procedures.

 

[HonkeyDonk]

I was a QA tech for creative labs for a while. But my job was really really simple. I Just went into dell to test whether sound/video cards were bad or good using a few diagnostic programs. It was like, plug in card, run program, checks out ok or not, mark it good or bad and that was that. Sorry, thats all the info i can give

 

[Rage187]

and OMG, there is sooooo much documentation.


I hope you did your homework in school, cause this is 10x worse than that.

I never did my homework, and cant stand the freakin paperwork.

 

[kt]

In a few words, quality assurance procedures would involve breaking a product. Meaning you will be playing around with a product and try to find as many bugs as possible. Good QA analyst would know from experience what will most likely crash a program and try them first. The important thing is to remember and record every step you take in finding the bugs/crashes. Once you find a bug/crash you'll need to replicate it to the software developer.

What kind of software QA are you applying for?

 

[sygyzy]

The procedures seem complicated when written out but it's pretty easy once you do it over and over. First there are different flows. For us there are PRD's and SRS's, etc. The ones that QA cares most about is the SRS which is the Software Requirements Specifcations. On big projects we have to review it so we can give feedback and ask questions. Then on large projects we write a Test Plan off the SRS. That gets revised and approved. Then we write test cases which is really just a matrix. The idea is that anyone should be able to read your test cases and know how to test it. So you would have to include instructions, logins, test tools, etc.

Then we test. Move it to another server. Test again. All the while we are entering bugs into TeamTrack which is a bug tracking tool and it's also integrated into our development environment. Then each week we move all the new projects live and that is tested on the public servers.

Repeat.

 

[Rage187]

sygyzy: we luckily dont have to look at design specs. But i know its coming. And they dont review our test cases...yet...


I'm planning my escape though, gonna apply for project manager.

Seems pretty simple, you just walk around looking flustered the whole day and people leave you alone.

 

[joejld1]

Thanks all for the replies

I'm applying for an entry level QA analyst position.
The position is defined as requiring full knowledge of various OSes and being a procedural job, mainly...1. find problem, 2. create test cases, 3. and document
So I think its gonna be mainly a Black Box testing kinda of a job

I've just graduated and I'm assuming that my software engineering classes would be a big help in this since I went through the experience of creating quite a bit of test procedurals on software that my teams created. I remember them quite well since my team had to write, what seemed like, textbook-size documentations, some over 100+ pages.

 

[joejld1]

Originally posted by: Rage187
sygyzy: we luckily dont have to look at design specs. But i know its coming. And they dont review our test cases...yet...


I'm planning my escape though, gonna apply for project manager.

Seems pretty simple, you just walk around looking flustered the whole day and people leave you alone.

LOL

they know not to mess around with the project manager when he's not in the mood, or at least when he does not appear to be in the mood

 

[Rage187]

Nah, they just cant kick a man when he's already down.