Practical Techniques for Software Quality Assurance (Elective)

This course covers the Elective area of the Certified Test Manager (CTM) certification, Certified Software Test Professional certification and the CSTAS certification.

For costs and cities where this course might be offered, please see the right border of this page or to bring this course to your test team at your location, contact our Education and Professionals Services Group.

Concepts

The software quality assurance function has been misunderstood by many organizations. This course is intended for every software quality professional looking for practical techniques and approaches to achieve software quality. It will provide practical advice to help organizations establish a quality assurance function. Although this course does not exclude testing as an effective means to controlling the quality of software, it will discuss many other approaches that can achieve much higher levels of quality with less resources. The course will focus on building quality into software rather than just controlling quality at the end.

Outline

• Software Quality Concepts
  • Understanding software quality
  • Quality assurance Vs quality control
  • The software quality puzzle
  • Static Vs dynamic quality
  • Establishing a QA function
• Software Process Improvement
  • What is a process
  • Why do we need a process
  • Defining a process
  • Different software-related processes
• Requirement Engineering and Management
  • Why requirements are so important
  • Definitions
  • Requirement tracking
  • Knowing the user
  • Understanding ambiguity in requirements
  • Functional Vs Quality Requirements
  • Techniques for exploring requirements
  • Models for refining requirements
  • Documenting requirements
• Reviews and Inspections
  • Why inspection is important
  • Why do most inspection programs fail
  • What to inspect and when
  • Four different variations of inspections
  • Validation Vs Verification
• Testing
  • Testing defined
  • Testing terminology
  • Static vs. Dynamic testing
  • The testing lifecycle
  • Testing Levels
  • Unit testing
  • Integration testing
  • System testing
  • Major areas of systems testing
  • Usability and GUI testing
  • GUI Navigation Diagrams
  • User acceptance and Beta testing
  • Regression testing
  • Test planning
• Change Tracking and Defect Tracking
  • Why change tracking
  • The difference between change tracking and defect tracking
  • A model for defect tracking
• Measurements
  • The role of measurements in improving software quality
  • Different types of measurements:
  • Product Vs Process measurements
  • Starting a measurement program
  • Measuring software quality and productivity