Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
10..
Product Development
If you are working on a product development project for a software vendor, then
you will be working on different versions of the same software over time. As a test
professional, you are expected to work with a lot of regression testing. You are also
expected to work on the production environment (software that is implemented
and running at your customer's customer sites). Your team will be expected to run
regression tests on these production sites whenever any new patch is applied. Also
your team will be expected to do daily sanity checks on all of their sites. So the
software test team is expected to do a lot of work with new releases and customer-
specific implementations.
In short, you are expected to work in all phases of the product life cycle, be it
the requirement stage, design, build, UAT, go live, or production. The customer
expects that your team will be able to handle software testing work in all phases of
the software product life cycle.
By its very nature, product development work is continuous and incremental. So
the development projects and their associated test projects are short and frequent.
The traditional waterfall model cannot be applied on these projects. Software test-
ing for these kinds of projects needs to have a continuous process approach. In
such situations the CMMI process model is the most suitable, as it allows integra-
tion of development, production, and maintenance activities. Software testing also
revolves around these activities.
Due to the large number of test cases to be executed in regression cycles, it
makes good sense to try to automate these test cases as much as possible. Customers
will never wait for the time required to manually execute these large numbers of
test cases every time a new release is due.
Sanity tests for production instances should also be automated, as they are run
on a daily basis. Customers look to eliminate staff costs in running these tests as
well as wanting to make sure that all features of the software are checked daily to
verify that they are working. So sanity tests need to be completely automated and
should run automatically at a specified time without any human intervention.
10.. History
IT and MIS departments traditionally have taken care of the IT needs of any com-
pany. Before the dawn of ERPs and enterprise applications developed by software
vendors, they used to develop, test, implement, and maintain all IT systems for
their company. So all departments within their company used to be their internal
customers. After consultation with any department, they would initiate a software
project to develop a system for that specific department.
These systems used to be at the department level. Interdepartmental commu-
nication used to be on paper, and these departmental systems were not connected
