Best practices to be followed in project:
1)Clear Identified Roles & Responsibilities:
A project can be divided in many phases: Requirement Analysis, High Level Design, Low Level Design,
Development:Construction (Coding)+ Unit Testing,Code Review,
System Integration Testing, Defect management: Debugging + V&V (Verification & Validation), User Acceptance Testing,
Move to Production (Cut over/Deployment), Warranty and Maintenance. We should have very clear identified roles and
responsibilities(Ownerships) for each and every phase. It would become difficult to have a good team
by introducing people just for sake of name.
2)QA part:
Testing is a very impotent phase of a project. As per good project plan QA roles starts from Analysis phase of project
it self. It's must to involve at least one QA resource in all project meets. If we are following water fall model approach, in all sign off meetings there should be at least one resource from QA side ( Usually QA lead)।If we are following iterative & prototype model , then it's must to involve one person from QA side in project planning meets।
3)Test Plan:
We should have proper test plan. We should have separate 2 documents for Unit testing & QA testing (One for each).
A good test plan must cover at least following objectives:
- Functions to be tested.
- Test Management.
- Test Tools (Mercury Interactive Quality center for defect tracking,QA inspection check list, PL/SQL tool, telnet etc).
- Test Acceptance Criteria.
- Test Exit Criteria.
- Approvals.
- Supporting Documents ( Like file format documents against which we need to validate).
- Dependencies.
- Roles and responsibilities.
- Test Schedule.
- Test Strategy.
- Contact Details.
- Risks.
- Assumptions.
- Test Scope ( In scope. Out scope).
- Test Objectives.
- Revision History of test plan.
4) Test cases:
We should cover all criteria while executing test cases.
For example recently we did not have plan for "Null values" test case & Identified as defect in QA.
5)Time Line:
It's must to finalize the time line for each phase by involving respective owners. "Must do" situation is meaning less without " I am in" feeling.
6)Communication Skill:
Communication is the blood of any organization. It's good to focus on typo and structure, but the same time we should not ignore the essential components of the communication. Typo and Structure is just body of communication, but soul of communication is it's essential parts.
For example we observed often: For any good thing done people are using "I" : I ran the job.., I followed for status..., I will resolve the issue & get back to you etc.
For any thing bad people are using "You": You should ask me before making decision...It's your responsibility etc..
When we are talking about soul of communication skill, it's start with "We": For good & bad things in project, there is only one word "We" : We ran the job. We should sync with each other before making decision..We populated wrong file in QA..etc
Let's create a great work culture by following best practices.
"Rajneesh"
