The Latest

This article is based on the problems that we faced in implementing configuration management in our project. Status Accounting has been the buzz word around the field of configuration management, but how to do it and what is the real intention of doing status accounting? This article tries to identify some of the issues and the means to solve them.

If you establish an appropriate infrastructure, you can perform client-side testing on a servlet immediately after you compile it and perform unit testing. Of course, testing early doesn't eliminate the need for later application-wide testing. However, it does improve the overall efficiency of your development process and make the later phases of testing decidedly less painful.

In the busy world of quality assurance and testing, we often as individual testers/quality assurance professionals dig in and do the daily work we need to do and sometimes leave the overall quality measures to those in management positions. As individuals we need to realize that each of us makes an impact on quality, whether we are proactively and consciously doing so or not.

From a large amount of research, this paper presents best practices for website testing.

Testers are often on the critical path for getting a software release out. They must plan carefully in order to minimize the critical path, while still doing a complete job of testing. This schedule pressure is taken to an extreme when a production server must be taken offline in order to deploy the software, and everyone is waiting for the final test results before the system can go live again. Karen Johnson describes her company's carefully planned and orchestrated method for doing a final check of an installed system. Her story is relevant to e-commerce companies as well as IT shops that are under pressure to keep systems updated while minimizing downtime.

Most start-up companies start with paper-based change request management tools and then migrate to automated solutions. Many of the change request management tools available on the market integrate with the change management tool, and ensure that all bug fixes in the code are controlled and managed. Critical bugs reported while the product is in the field require immediate code fixes. The origin of some of these bugs is in the early development phases of requirements and design and may require documentation changes. When the number of field reported bugs is high, maintaining the traceability of the fixes is critical to future development activities. Also, research shows that over 70% of the defects originate from the requirements and design phases and that the cost of fixing these defects in successive phases increases exponentially. The key then remains in developing a change request management tool, which integrates with the CM tool and tracks the changes to the impacted configuratio

This article explains a set of six metrics, which collectively provide valuable insight into:

a) Effort variation
b) Assessing the organizational capability
c) Knowing how well the organization meets its commitments on time
d) Defect detection capability of QA&QC activities, hence control on price of conformance
e) Defect leakage across the phases of projects, organization wide
f) Productivity metrics - a sure input to scheduling

These six metrics are easy to understand and implement. The cost of implementation will be minimal, if the basic systems like time tracking and defect tracking systems are in place, and the organization follows a standard method for project size estimation.