3rd relationship between software testing and quality assurance

Software testing plays an important role in the software life cycle. In the traditional waterfall model, software testing is only prior to coding and maintenance, it is the final means to ensure the quality of software before software products are delivered to users. This is misleading. We have already explained in the "1st back-to-V model, my complete interpretation" that each stage of the software lifecycle should contain tests, from static testing to dynamic testing, it is required to check whether the results of each stage meet the quality requirements and the defined goals, and identify and correct errors as early as possible. If you do not perform tests in the early stages, the spread of errors and accumulation of errors will often lead to great difficulties in testing the final finished product, extend the development cycle, and increase development costs.

In fact, no matter what technology or method is used, there will still be errors in the software. Using new languages, advanced development methods, and a complete development process can reduce the introduction of errors, but it is impossible to completely eliminate errors in the software. These introduced errors need to be discovered through testing, the error density in the software also needs to be tested for estimation. Testing is the basic unit of all engineering disciplines and an important part of software development. It has been accompanied by software development for more than half a century. Statistics show that in typical software development projects, software testing workload often accounts for more than 40% of the total workload of software development. In the total cost of software development, the overhead for testing accounts for 30% to 50%.

Generally, standardized software testing processes include project plan inspection, test plan creation, test design, execution test, and update test documents. QA Activities can be summarized as: Coordinating measurement, risk management, document inspection, promoting/assisting process improvement, and monitoring and testing. The similarities between them are that they all run through the entire software development lifecycle process.

The function of software quality assurance (SQA) is to provide correct and visualized information to the management to facilitate and assist in process improvement. S QA It also acts as the mentor and supervisor of the testing work to help the software testing establish quality standards, testing process review methods and testing processes, and detect problems in the software testing process in a timely manner through tracking, auditing and review, so as to help improve the test or the entire development process, so with S QA , Testing can be objectively checked and evaluated, and can also help improve the testing process.

The test provides data and basis for SQA to help SQA better understand the implementation, process quality, product quality and process improvement progress of the quality plan, so that SQA can better perform the next step.

Their difference lies in S QA Focusing on process management and control in the process is a management task, focusing on processes and methods. Testing is the implementation of management and control policies for various processes in the process, and the target is software products (including phased products). That is, testing is the test of software products, it is a technical task. Testing is often considered the most important means of quality control. However, over time, the boundaries between software quality assurance and software quality control have become increasingly vague. That is to say, software testing is an important means in SQA. The main functions of SQA are embodied in software testing, which is concentrated in static testing. The relationship between SQA and SQA is getting closer and cannot be separated.

To predict the future, read the next decomposition: 4th software testing objectives

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-For the series of discussions, see: Software Testing romance-intermediate and advanced series (sequence)