What is QA? Before lunch today my uneducated mind would have considered QA as a task easily handed over to India groups with little change. WRONG.
QA Master as I will call her has over 25 years of experience testing things from underwater keyboards to environmental protection mechanisms. She has lived and breathed the technology world for the past 10 and shared her thoughts on her India relationships in a way that opened new doors to methodologies in my mind. Her is a summary of her experiences:
Works: Asking simple questions.
Does the light blink?
Does the hard drive spin?
Works: Detailed testing with several if/then statements.
If every possible behavior is included in the testing documentation (impossible apparently).
Doesn't Work: Expecting that erratic or unexplained behaviors will be documented.
This is BAD. For example if the computer crashes, and this is not listed as a possible behavior that is being inspected, its quite possible that lack of "out of the box" thinking will lead to poor or little documentation of the unexpected.
Doesn't Work: Expecting logical open ended assignments to root out interesting product flaws.
When is the last time you have seen a word with 5000 characters? This was a question she posed to one of her group members when they spent quite a bit of time trying to test filling the entire text box with one word--great if you are looking into buffer overflow possibilities--bad if you are testing the printing of text into formats.
So what is ideal? After some brainstorming we came up with one suggestion: testing products that have already been in the market place. Here you are seeking to match known behaviors in an old product with the expectation of the new product performing in the same manner. This hand in hand with rigorous documentation in the instructions and training on identifying unexpected flaws. Support systems are key here--these employees must have someone they can easily "show" something strange to or a way to document (video file, pictures) to send it out for further evaluation.
