Course Description
Learn how QA responsibilities are distributed between the BA and QA
professional over the project lifecycle. As you follow a project from
initiation through to deployment and operations, you’ll learn and
experience how BA and QA artifacts and activities fit together over the
SDLC as you apply the V-Model. (The V-Model is widely used model
outlining the relationship between product development and QA
activities.) You’ll develop techniques to improve requirements-writing
skills to create testable requirements, and acquire hands-on experience
using essential V&V (Verification and Validation) techniques. The
course includes use-case scenario testing, creation of the QA Plan,
functional and non-functional (system) testing, QA metrics, Acceptance
Testing, Decision Tables and Structured Walkthroughs, and incorporates
BABOK 2, Six Sigma and Structured Testing guidelines.
Why Attend this Course?
Projects are frequently behind schedule and over-budget due to the
numerous revisions often required until the software matches the needs
of business stakeholders.
Most of these revisions can be traced to errors or omissions either:
- In the business requirements documentation (the original agreement with the developers).
- Due to bugs in the code.
- Not only do errors and omissions increase project costs and turnaround times, they erode customer confidence.
By effectively employing Quality Assurance techniques, the BA and QA professional are able to improve project outcomes, by:
- Verifying throughout the life cycle that the project does not stray from customer expectations.
- Performing extensive and well-targeted tests on the software before
it is released to unearth errors that have been introduced during
analysis and development.
What Makes this Course Stand Apart?
- Clear delineation of the distribution of QA responsibilities across the BA and QA Professional roles.
- Full life cycle QA: The trainee learns through practice what QA
deliverables to create at each stage of a project and how all of the
resulting artifacts connect to each other to support QA over the SDLC.
- Six-Sigma: Incorporates the most popular, current and effective QA approaches, including Six-Sigma.
The Job Aids:
Each trainee receives invaluable Job Aids for use back at the office,
including a complete test plan, test case template and a guide for
Structured Walkthroughs.
Experience:
Our course is written and delivered by professionals with extensive practical experience in Quality Assurance for IT projects.
Audience:
• Business Analysts
• QA Professionals: QA Analysts, Testers, and their managers
• Business users and developers who need to be able to test computer systems from a business and user perspective
Prerequisites:
None
Class Format:
Trainees work in teams, developing a case study by performing QA
activities over the course of a project. The instructor introduces each
step by reviewing techniques required at that stage. Working
individually or in groups (as appropriate for the step), trainees
perform QA activities and create QA deliverables, with the instructor
acting as mentor. After each step is completed, the instructor takes up
common issues arising during the workshop.
Objectives:
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Gain hands-on experience using essential testing techniques
- Increase knowledge of the relationship between testing techniques and requirements documentation
- Develop techniques to improve requirements writing skills to create testable requirements
- Describe the BA and QA Professional’s role in testing
- Describe the definition and goals of testing
- Apply the principles of structured testing
- Define different types of testing and know when to use each type of test on a project
- Apply the V-Model
- Create a QA plan
- Perform a Structured Walkthrough to test requirements documentation
- Perform Validation and Verification of requirements, design and coding deliverables
- Review and ensure the quality of the testing strategy using Structured Testing
- Design Functional and System (Non-functional) tests including black box test case techniques
- Design an Acceptance Testing strategy
- Describe QA metrics
- Apply Six Sigma techniques to testing
- Ensure complete test coverage with effective use of decision tables
BABOK 2 Alignment
Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring
•KA Task
- 2.1 Plan Business Analysis Approach
– Lesson 4: guidance on Structured Walkthroughs (a means of validating a business analysis approach).
Elicitation
•3.2 Conduct Elicitation Activity
– Lesson 4: guidance on gathering metrics for non-functional (service level) requirements.
•4.3 Maintain Requirements for Reuse
– Lessons 8: guidance on mapping requirements to ongoing operations.
Requirements Management and Communication
•4.5 Communicate Requirements
– Lesson 4: guidelines on reviewing requirements using Structured Walkthroughs.
Requirements Analysis
•6.3 Specify and Model Requirements
– Lesson 4: guidance on gathering metrics for nonfunctional (service level) requirements.
•6.5 Verify Requirements
– Lesson 4: guidance and hands-on experience in the use to Structured Walkthroughs to verify requirements.
•7.2 Allocate Requirements
–
Lesson 5: guidance and hands-on experience using Decision Tables for
Business Rules Analysis (for rules that may be managed through the
software solution).
Solution Assessment and Validation
•7.5 Validate Solution
– Designing tests to assess deployed solutions and ensure adequate test coverage
– Testing of non-functional (service level) requirements using System Tests.