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Questions tagged [qa]

Quality assurance, or QA for short, is the systematic monitoring and evaluation of the various aspects of a project, service or facility to maximize the probability that minimum standards of quality are being attained by the production process. QA cannot absolutely guarantee the production of quality products.

Software Quality Assurance (SQA or QA) includes standards and procedures that administrators may use to review and audit software products and activities to verify that the software process meets standards. According to ISO/IEC 15504 v.2.5 (SPICE), it is a supporting process that provides the independent assurance that all work products, activities and processes comply with the predefined plans and ISO 15504.2

Software Quality

There are many different definitions of software quality in the industry. For some it is the "capability of a software product to conform to requirements." (ISO/IEC 9001) while for others it can be synonymous with "customer value" or even defect level.6

QA vs QC Misconception

Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) are two terms that are often used interchangeably. Although similar, there are distinct differences between the two concepts3:

  • Quality Assurance is process-oriented and focuses on defect prevention
  • Quality Control is product-oriented and focuses on defect identification.4

In the Software Industry:

  • Software Quality Assurance prevents software defects by ensuring the quality of the processes used to create software (e.g. software development process, software testing process, requirements management process, etc). This is done by verifying them against standards (e.g CMMI, SPICE, internal process guidelines, etc)2. It is based on the premise that a quality process will produce a quality product7.
  • Software Quality Control finds software defects by validating the products of the software development process (e.g. design documents, code, test cases) against established criteria (e.g. "does the software meet the requirements?", "do the design documents address all the use cases?", etc)8.

QA and QC are a part of Quality Management (along with Quality Improvement and Quality Planning)5.

See also:

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Best way to stress test a website

This may be the wrong question to ask but, what's the best way to replicate a large load on an asp.net web application? Is there an easy way to simulate many requests on particular pages? Or is the best thing to use a profiler to track a single…
Charlie Bear
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Git branching strategy integated with testing/QA process

Our development team has been using the GitFlow branching strategy and it has been great ! Recently we recruited a couple testers to improve our software quality. The idea is that every feature should be tested/QA by a tester. In the past,…
David Lin
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How-to turn off all SSL checks for postman for a specific site

Please read this carefully. Please do not send me a link on how to import a certificate. I I am using Postman for QA and testing work. I have a test system I frequently rebuild myself and so it is completely trusted. It has custom self signed…
PJLopez
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What tools do you use to test your public REST API?

Looking for tools use to test REST API. So far I'm only aware of SoapUI. I've tried SOAPUI but - at least in a mac - it's terrible. Wondering what people are using to test their own APIs.
dscape
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Difference between system testing and end-to-end testing

What is end-to-end testing, and what is the difference between it and system testing? They both seem the same and check the application as a whole. Definitions on the net are very confusing.
a Learner
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Should black box or white box testing be the emphasis for testers?

Which type of testing would you say should be the emphasis (for testers/QAs), and why? A quick set of definitions from wikipedia: Black box testing takes an external perspective of the test object to derive test cases. These tests can be…
TM.
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How to create large PDF files (10MB, 50MB, 100MB, 200MB, 500MB, 1GB, etc.) for testing purposes?

I tried this for ((i=1; i<=10; i++)); do convert 100MB.pdf 10MB.pdf 100MB.pdf; done to create 100MB file but very quickly run out of RAM. Any ideas?
tkane
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C++ Jenkins QA Stack / Tools

We are currently in the process of building a QA stack for you C++ development. We already have multiple Jenkins instances running and made very good experiences with the CI server in combination with other languages like java and php. What I'm…
edorian
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WebDriver executeAsyncScript vs executeScript

What is the difference between executeAsyncScript and executeScript? How can i use event such as window.onload? I tried something like this ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeAsyncScript("window.onload = function() {alert('Hello')}"); But of…
vispart
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QA vs Development Ratio

I am working as a software developer and I had a quarrel today with our QA team about the following: How much the QA team members should exceed the number of developers that are working on the same product? I know that this is not a question about…
Narek
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Selenium Web Test Automation Framework Best Practices

I would like to know your comments on best practices developing web test automation framework I basically read couple of blogs and finally got convinced with David Burns approach listed in book - "Selenium 1.0 Testing Tools: Beginner’s Guide" in…
Siva
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Quality assurance in small developer teams

Ideally, in a project, you will have developers, testers, QA manager(s) etc which all make their contribution to the quality of the code. But what if you don't have that kind of resources? If you just have, for example, three developers and don't…
Kim L
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How should Git Flow work with QA testing both a release and a new feature?

We are using Git Flow on our latest iOS project and I am trying to work out a way of working with QA so that they can test the latest release, as well as testing a new feature, without having to worry about which bugs were fixed in which branch. At…
jowie
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Developer testing vs. QA team testing - What is the right division of work?

While trying to advocate more developer testing, I find the argument "Isn't that QA's job?" is used a lot. In my mind, it doesn't make sense to give the QA team all testing responsibilities, but at the same time Spolsky and others say you shouldn't…
Joe Schneider
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Open source Tool for Stress, Load and Performance testing

Possible Duplicate: How do you stress test a web application? Currently I have configured a project with cc.net, watin and nunit and now I want to do stress, load, and performance testing of my .net projects. Any idea which opensource tool should…
sam
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