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Testing (QA)
Testing is, arguably, the most important and most underrated part of the SDLC. You may have heard of black box testing and white box testing, manual and automated testing, etc.
But whatever the color, whatever the methodology, whatever the type of test, the underlying principle that the QA teams must follow is to ensure that no efforts are spared to break the application or software being tested.
Sounds very negative and counter-intuitive, but the QA engineers must ensure that the purpose for which the client wanted the application in the first place is being met. This requires thinking of all corner cases and scenarios that may have been overlooked in all earlier phases. So, in that sense, their effort must be to try and break the system at any cost. Only when they fail to do so can you be assured of a high quality product.
However, QA planning and due diligence must start right after requirements are finalized. Issues fixed at earlier stages can be fixed at a much lower cost than issues fixed towards the end.
For example, an issue that takes about $10 to fix at the requirements stage may become a $1000 problem if addressed prior to deployment. Fixing later may entail changes in other requirements and cause the database design, etc., to be re-done, with a lot of impact on the code for inter-related functionalities, causing additional bugs to come up.
Again, a traceability matrix tracing test cases to requirements and/or features is necessary to ensure that all functionality is built as desired. Any time a change is effected to the requirements, the matrices must be updated to ensure compliance.
Tools are available to manage bugs and run automated scripts. Bugzilla is probably the best-known freeware to track bugs from identification to completion. Test Run is a simple web-based tool to manage and collaborate on test plans. Web applications, as probably most are that you deal with, should be tested against W3C standards using the various available validation tools.
Many tools are available, both freeware and commercial, for various types of testing and you must identify the right ones for your needs.
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