When QA Will Fail; No Matter What You Do

October 23, 2013
admin
- General

In software testing we come across different kinds of clients; those who still follow the good old waterfall, those who are ardent fans of agile and those who are struggling to adopt agile and think that they will succeed one day!

Adding to the complexity of our projects, there are some factors such as time zones differences, time tied deliveries, ever changing development and testing technologies and managerial frictions etc. Being a Project Manager I have to deal with all of the above mentioned issues and just a little bit more!

At Kualitatem we work on a wide range of projects from a wide spectrum of business and service areas. In terms of platforms we are handling website, web apps and now the new mobile app zone which comes with its own challenges. Functional, automation, performance, code reviews, usability… you name it and we do it!

Being the proud flag bearer of my team I can safely say that my team excels at most of the projects and has a 99.9% success rate. For the remaining percentage I strongly believe that failure is nature’s way of preparing you for success! And so I encourage my team to learn from their failures and mistakes.

In this post I have tried to round up some particular situations which I have come across that have led QA to fail on behalf of factors which were beyond our control:

– The development lead tells me that the code is too complex for him to explain!

QA response: About time your boss hires someone else!

– Development is running behind schedule yet they want everything to be tested in regression testing

Let me explain what regression testing is: it’s an approach to test a system efficiently by systematically selecting the appropriate minimum set of tests needed to adequately cover a particular change!

– 6 pm local time: Development team is gone after delivering the code!

QA response: We are doomed, aren’t we?

– For performance testing project the client wants web app to be tested for 1,000,000,000 [you read it correctly: one billion!] concurrent, simultaneous, parallel users!