Managing Quality Assurance Work

After Product Marketing defines release features and Engineering implements the features, Quality Assurance writes test plans to validate the features. QA enters each completed test plan as an individual record in Release Manager, and links each test plan to the features it is designed to validate.

Next, Quality Assurance creates test strategies, which are logical groupings of test plans. (For example, Quality Assurance might group together all test plans for an application module as a test strategy. Alternatively, Quality Assurance might group together all test plans to execute on the same platform and browser combination as a test strategy.) QA enters each completed test strategy as an individual record in Release Manager, and links each test strategy to the test plans that it groups together.

After defining test strategies, Quality Assurance runs test plan executions, or test passes. QA logs each test plan execution as a test pass record. When recording the test passes, Quality Assurance links the test pass records to respective test plans. QA records the defects found during testing as change request records and links the records to the associated test passes.

During and after testing, Quality Assurance managers can run various reports about test pass results to monitor the health and progress of the product release effort.