2.8.08

What the Auditors Want to Know from the Testers

When testing a product the auditors want to know:

1. What does the software or system do?

2. What are you going to do to prove that it works?

3. What are your test results? Did it work under the required environment? Or, did you have to tweak it?

· To test means to compare an actual result to a standard. If there is no standard to compare against, there can be no test.

· Obviously, there is great room for improvement in the software testing environment. Testing is often insufficient and frequently nonexistent. But valuable software testing can take place, even in the constraints (and seeming chaos) of the present market, and the test effort can and should add value and quality to the product.

Quality Assurance: All those planned and systematic actions necessary to provide adequate confidence that a product or service will satisfy given requirements for quality.

· The best combination: Formal design inspections, formal quality assurance, formal testing 77%-95%

· Quality is not a thing; it is the measure of a thing. Quality is a metric. The thing that quality measures is excellence. How much excellence does a thing possess? Excellence is the fact or condition of excelling; of superiority; surpassing goodness or merit.

1. The definition of quality is "conformance with requirements."

2. The system for achieving quality is "prevention, not cure."

3. The measure of success is "the cost of quality."

4. The target goal of the quality process is "Zero defects-get it right the first time."

· Overplanning and underplanning the product are two of the main failings in software development efforts today.

· A development process that does not allow sufficient time for design, test, and fix cycles will fail to produce the right product.

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