Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
10.1.3 Test Planning
Testing can be a resource intensive activity. This means that tests should be
planned in a very specific manner as to provide testers with the resources that they
need, including adequate time. Test planning should be planned and scheduled
before the conception of the project to facilitate tractability throughout the entire
process (Sommerville
2004
). By planning far ahead, resources that must be
ordered or specialists that must be hired will have time to arrive and there will be
adequate time for the testers to complete their tasks before their results are due.
The tester may need to reserve special hardware or he may have to construct
large, complex data sets. They will have to spend large amounts of time verifying
that the expected results section of each test case accurately corresponds to the
correct behavior. In this next section, I want to present two techniques for
determining which parts of the product should be tested more intensely than other
parts. This information will be used to reduce the amount of effort expended while
only marginally affecting the quality of the resulting product (McGregor
1994
).
10.2 Quality and Internal Controls
A fault is injected into the software when a human makes a mistake. One mistake
on software may cause several faults; conversely, various mistakes may cause the
identical fault. A failure is observed as incorrect behavior of the software product
as a consequence of a fault, and the error is the amount by which a result is
incorrect. The word defect is a generic term for a fault, failure, or error. The term
quality implies excellence of some sort, but this unfortunately is infrequently the
meaning intended by software engineers. The quality of software is the extent to
which the product satisfies its specifications. The task of every software profes-
sional is to ensure high-quality software at all times. That is, each developer and
maintainer is personally responsible for checking that his or her work is correct.
Quality is not something added afterward by the software quality assurance group,
but rather must be built in by the developers from the very beginning. One role of
SQA group is to ensure that developers are indeed doing high quality work
(Schach
2007
).
10.2.1 Assuring Quality Software
One aspect of the role of the SQA group is to test that the developers' product is
correct. More precisely, once the developers have completed a workflow and
carefully checked their work, members of the SQA group have to ensure that the
workflow has indeed been carried out correctly. Software quality assurance goes
