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Severity vs. Priority of a Bug

By on October 20, 2008 in Best Practices, Bug Reporting

This week the subject came up again at a customer: “why do we need a separate bug field for Priority and Severity…”? To make a long story short, the Dev Lead kept saying that he only looks at the Priority field and so we shouldn’t waste time writing down the Severity; then (to emphasize his [...]

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QA as Customer Representatives within the R&D

By on October 13, 2008 in Best Practices

In many R&D organizations the QA takes the role of the Customer Advocate, testing the system and even arguing in favor of fixing defects based on their internal perception of how customers use the product. In some companies Test Engineers even take the role of Users during Internal Design Reviews. Why does this happen? Your [...]

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3 easy to use risk-based testing activities

By on September 15, 2008 in Best Practices, Test Process

Quoting James Bach: “The more likely the problem is to happen, and the more impact it will have it if happens, the higher the risk associated with that problem” Or in simply put: Risk = Impact * Likelihood If risk-based testing is so simple then how come most projects fail to implement it? The answer [...]

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How to use easy to find bug information to improve the quality of your testing

By on August 26, 2008 in Best Practices, Bug Reporting, Metrics & Statistics, On-Going Improvement

On-going improvements are usually sitting quietly under our noses…Taking a closer look at our bugs and the information available in them we can come up with very strong upgrades to our testing process. Following are 4 metrics you can collect easily during your regular bug lifecycle that can provide good leads into places where you [...]

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Good Project Retrospectives

By on July 31, 2008 in Best Practices, Test Process

Retrospectives can potentially be one of the most beneficial tools in software development; then again most retrospectives I’ve participated in where a complete waste of time…The idea of a retrospective, or postmortem as we called them about 10 years ago, is simple. At the end of the project take the time to define 3 things:1. [...]

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Taking your product for a successful test drive – How to run a good Beta Program

By on July 20, 2008 in Best Practices, Test Process

QuackTest is in the process of sharpening its feathers in order to take its maiden Beta Flight. In fact, there are already a couple of Organizations running the platform in their production projects as part of our initial steps into this vital part of the software development lifecycle… The Beta is one of the most [...]

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