Increased Awareness of QA

Introduction

I am Okapi, from the Quality Assurance Group. Since I often participate in projects as the primary person in charge of QA, in this article, I'd like to share how QA team participates in projects, communicates with the development team, and progresses in its testing at KINTO Technologies.

Purpose of This Article

When proceeding a project with a team that has never worked with QA before, there is often some trial and error involved as they try to understand what QA can contribute and how the process will unfold. To ensure smoother progress in such cases, I aim to raise awareness of QA.

What is QA?

QA is an acronym for "Quality Assurance." "Quality Assurance" is a broad term that involves ensuring quality in various aspects. We conduct testing from the user's perspective, by focusing on scenario testing based on actual user usage assumptions and verifying screen UI to prevent any inconvenience and ensure usability.

The primary roles of the QA and development teams in testing are outlined in the table below. | Item | QA | Development | Remarks | | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | | Verify specifications against
system requirements | ㅤ◎ㅤㅤ | ㅤ〇ㅤㅤ| QA ensures that functions and performance meet system requirements, based on user's perspective. | |Verify according to scenarios of user use | ㅤ◎ㅤㅤ | ㅤ△ㅤㅤ| Mainly verified by QA | | Other than the above | ㅤ△ㅤ ㅤ| ㅤ◎ㅤㅤ| When requested, the development team's external integration testing and QA will verify within feasible resource limits |

Overview of QA testing

Phase	Summary
Test Plan Phase	Share overall project schedule and specification documents (system requirements and screen specifications) to allow QA to create a test plan detailing how the subsequent phases will proceed.
Test Analysis Phase	Based on specification documents (system requirements and screen specifications), create test perspectives that clarify the scope of testing (to be tested/not to be tested).
Test Design Phase	Create test cases (prerequisites, procedures, and expectations) based on the test perspectives.
Test Implementation Phase	Conduct tests based on the created test cases, report defects, and verify modifications.

Points Requiring Communication with the Development Team

Test Plan Phase

Ensure alignment with the development team based on the test plan, which outlines the QA testing period, verification environment, person in charge of conducting QA testing, development team contact, and target devices/browsers.

Test Analysis Phase

Use JIRA or Confluence to ask questions about the information necessary to create test perspectives. For areas with differing understandings or multiple development team contacts, hold meetings to confirm and organize the specifications.

Once the specifications are organized, create test perspectives that clearly define the test scope (to be tested/not to be tested) and confirm alignment with the development team.

For the test scope, from a black box testing perspective, the target is on areas users will actually interact with (as deemed necessary by QA for the project), while excluding areas users do not access, such as system administration screens. However, since scenario testing involves verifying the sequence of flow, areas that intersect with the user-side testing, even if typically excluded, are included as test targets. *For regression testing, where quality is assured, the test scope is adjusted based on the shared schedule and resources.

Test Design Phase

The procedure for conducting tests will be reviewed, but test cases are created based on the agreed-upon test perspectives. Therefore, alignment with the development team is basically not conducted at this phase.

Test Implementation Phase

Issues (expected results differing from specifications), questions (missing or unclear specifications), and improvement requests (aligned with specifications but unclear to users) are reported in JIRA. Once addressed by the development team (fixes), the QA team conducts re-verification. Testing is considered complete when all test cases and the JIRA tickets are addressed, or when the remaining JIRA tickets are excluded from the current QA test scope. Once implementation is complete, we participate in the overall retrospective (e.g., KPT analysis) to discuss areas for improvement and apply them to future projects.

Future Challenges

Depending on the project or product, "how to organize the documents" may differ, so after aligning on specifications in JIRA or Confluence, QA organizes and documents the overall user-related system specifications and workflows before moving forward. However, depending on the system's scale, this can be time-consuming. By organizing documents and processes within the QA team and ensuring smooth communication with the development team, we aim to efficiently summarize specifications for accurate understanding.

Conclusion

The QA team is an independent organization, which may give the development team the impression that they are requesting tasks to QA or that QA is simply conducting tests. However, as part of KINTO Technologies, we see ourselves as partners working together to create high-quality systems. Therefore, we aim to continue fostering a collaborative relationship.