Words From a Purple Mind

The test plan is very important in any organization. The Test Plan defines the project’s objectives, scope, approach, and focus of its testing efforts. The process of preparing a Test Plan provides an effective way to think through the efforts needed to validate the acceptability of the application under test (AUT).

There are various roles on projects, some people may play more than one role. You should always check with your organizations testing methodology on what your role(s) are. Below is a breakdown of quality assurance roles and responsibilities:

Phase: All

Test Lead
• Oversees all testing staff and activities for all assigned applications

Test Management tools are very important to any test team. Test teams use these tools to help capture requirements, design test cases, map test cases to requirements, test execution reports and much more. Companies may use one to many tools for this, which range from very expensive to open source. My advice would be to pick a tool that can meet most of your current and near future needs.

No matter how good you think your code is there is always going to be a bug/defect of some kind. Defect numbers may range from 1 to thousands so it’s important to have a very good tracking tool. There are commercial tools out there but I figured I’d focus on the open source tools.

Xcelsius allows you to create interactive dashboards for your personal use or your organization. You can create the dashboards from Microsoft Excel or a live data source, and export your dashboard to a another format – Microsoft Office, Flash (SWF) files, Adobe PDF, and Adobe Air.

Xcelsius Engage 2008

On 10/28/2008 I attended the 1st annual MindSurf Conference, which had various sessions for Business Analysis, Project Management and more. The sessions I thought that stood above the rest were:

• So Who Does What Anyway? Sorting out Business Analysis and Project Management
• Enterprise Analysis: Finding the Heart and Head of the Organization