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

Software testing is not just limited to testing the application, it also includes documentation. Testing documentation is used for a variety of reasons:

• Explains the purpose & goal of testing
• Explains will be tested & how
• Provide testing results to the project team

Performance testing is a general term used to describe testing activities where a simulated user load is directed at a system and measurements are gathered. It is designed to meet or exceed a set of system performance goals while maintaining a particular user load profile. It places variable load – from a minimum to a maximum – on the system. The variable load demonstrates what the system can sustain without running out of resource or having transactions perform in a less-than-optimal fashion.

I was cleaning out a folder on my machine when I stumbled on an oldie but goodie PDF called “Classic Testing Mistakes” by Brian Marick.

In the paper he states how he breaks the classic mistakes into 5 themes and how to resolve the mistakes:

Security testing is a process to determine that an IS (Information System) protects data and maintains functionality as intended.

The six concepts that need to be covered by security testing are: confidentiality, integrity, authentication, authorization, availability, and non-repudiation.

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.

It is very important to make sure that your application functions as expected. There may be times that you add one little piece of code and all of a sudden other parts of the application no longer works. You may not have time/capacity to manually go back and regression test all the pieces of your application to make sure they are up to par. Companies use a variety of different testing tools for regression testing. There are lots of tools out there from very expensive to open source.

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.

It is very important to make sure that there are no broken links on your site. A link may be active when your first added it but as the days, months, years go by the link may end up being broken.

Below are some open source tools that can help you find those broken links.