The end of 2009 provided the TextWise Quality Assurance team with an opportunity to create some New Year’s resolutions. The end of the year coincided with the conclusion of a testing cycle giving us the chance to review what worked and what needs improvement as we plan for the future. This is not necessarily a year end activity and it is certainly not a once a year activity. Reviewing what worked and what didn’t work should be done at the end of each test cycle. But timing enables us to call this our New Year’s resolutions at least this one time.
Our first resolution is to review and update test cases. No matter how much we want to have our formal test cases completely defined before testing begins, there will inevitably be improvements that can be made to the documentation. Exploratory and ad hoc tests need to be written up as formal test cases. New test cases need to be updated or fleshed out based on what was learned during the test cycle. Bug reports and test reports are a useful resource for identifying gaps in the formal test documentation.
Our second resolution is to review and update our existing processes. These processes include both our internal QA team processes as well as larger organizational processes that intersect with QA work. This is an opportunity to address process issues that were encountered during the test cycle and to add new processes that may be needed. Some of the areas we look at are the processes dealing with requirements, design, release, and bug triage. Because many of these processes cross groups, all stakeholder must be involved in making changes.
Our third resolution is to review the data we collect and report. We review the specific data we are collecting, how we collect that data, and the format in which we present the data. Process improvements may be needed to improve our collection of data. Other groups, and particularly the management team, need to be involved to ensure that we are providing the information they needed to continue to grow our organization.
Our final resolution is to look to the future. All of the previous resolutions are aimed at making improvements for the future but they are based on what has happened in the past. Now is the time to also look forward at the projects that are coming our way and ask what information we need and what planning we need to do. It’s also an opportunity to take the things that we’ve learned from the previous resolutions and apply them to our pending tasks. In this way, we seek to continually improve the QA team and contribute to the growth of the organization.