Schedule and Events



March 26-29, 2012, Software Test Professionals Conference, New Orleans
July, 14-15, 2012 - Test Coach Camp, San Jose, California
July, 16-18, 2012 - Conference for the Association for Software Testing (CAST 2012), San Jose, California
August 2012+ - At Liberty; available. Contact me by email: Matt.Heusser@gmail.com

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Why is QA Always the Bottleneck?

"Why is QA always the bottleneck?" is the second in a series on how to deal with unfair test questions; it is up this week on SearchSoftwareQuality.com. (Free registration required.)

The next in the series will probably be "how long will testing take?", but i'm curious what you think. What questions do you struggle with, and what interesting answers do you know?

2 comments:

Parimala Hariprasad said...

@How long will testing take?

As long as buggy code is delivered to the testing team, testing will take time


In reality, there is no direct answer to the question on how long will testing take. I personally struggle with the below questions:


Question 1. How long is the development going to deliver highly buggy code(I am expecting a reasonable quality code. Imagine anything and everything crashing on the product!)?
Answer: If buggy code is delivered to the testing team to test, new bugs are found, followed by bug investigation and reporting which further delays the testing time

Question 2. How many bugs are coming FREE with the bug fixes given for already existing bugs?
Answer: If bug fixes are given and testers find new bugs as part of regression testing, this delays testing the regressions as well as testing of the actual features that were supposed to be tested alongwith regressions

Question 3. Why isn't the build system maintained in a proper conditions
Answer: If the builds delivered are broken/semi-broken, testing is further delayed by the enormous amount of time taken to debug and fire another build

Quetion 4.
Answer: If there too are many buddy fixes(Can you please test this fix before I integrate this into tomorrow's build?) that developers give to testers to test, the tester is lost between testing the actual working build and the buddy fixes. Usually, I think the developers do this to skip their own unit testing effort


To give an analogy in the medical field, You might get your blood/urine test report in a day or even less than that. But a Urine Culture report takes 3-4 days. Can we generalize the time taken for medical test reports without considering whether it is blood test, urine routine test or a urine culture test? I am afraid, we cannot generalize.

Let me know if you think I am deviating from the actual question,

Regards,
Parimala Shankaraiah
http://curioustester.blogspot.com

Parimala Hariprasad said...

Apologies. Question 4 got missed while editing(the mouse I am using is acting cranky off late).

here it is:
Question 4: Why are too many buddy fixes given to testers without directly integrating into the build(I do agree there could be some exceptions)?

Regards,
Parimala Shankaraiah
http://curioustester.blogspot.com