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This article provides project guidelines for quality assurance (QA) teams. It includes tips on team communication, test management, and specific areas to focus on during testing. The article also emphasizes the importance of documenting work, logging time, and involving the project manager (PM) in any customer requests.

During QA testing, it's important to focus on functional testing based on user stories. Some examples of functionality to focus on include new fields on the screen, workflows, business roles, calculations, changes in tables and data, and dashboards with filtering.

Project guidelines

Every project is different, however there are some general tips which can help you, especially when you new in QA team or you are just starting on a new project:

• Check who is in your project team - usually there is an internal meeting at the beginning of the project on which the project team is introduced

• Get link to the project’s Jira board and make sure the X-Ray is configured properly

• Check with PM your allocation and expectations from QA on the project - some projects can have special needs and you should know about them from the beginning of the project

• Testing on the project typically start with checking first data loaded to our sw - new Company Parameters tables, adding new columns, verifying data - for you it is good opportunity to start getting detailed information about the project

• During the project, keep in mind:

  • you should be focussed on functional testing based on user stories, unless you get another instructions from your PM

  • always document your work and make it visible - use test management tool for creating test cases and documenting your testing progress and testing results. Don’t forget to attach all relevant files.

  • functionality for testing should be described in user stories, however here are some general examples of what you should be focused on:

    • new fields on the screen

    • workflows

    • business roles

    • calculations

    • changes in tables and data

    • dashboards with filtering

  • Log your time every day, so it is clear for PM how much time you spent on testing

  • In case you need more time for testing as you allocation is not big enough, discuss it with you PM - he will either increase your allocation or discuss priorities for testing with you

  • on some projects you can be asked to do a functional demo for the customer - typically you should just show on qa partition what you tested and what is ready for the customer. The demo needs some preparation time, but as you should have everything well documented, there should not be a big issue with this.

  • Keep in mind that you should not get requests directly from the customer - in case it happened, contact your PM and share this with him. PM should always have an overview of who is doing what on the project so he should definitely know about those requests.

  • Teams is the main communication platform for communication with your project team

    • regular project meetings - sprint planning, project stand-ups, project retrospective

    • communication with PM - allocation, testing progress, requests from the customer

    • communication with CE/SA/IE - about functionality, an issue found, anything what can be quickly fixed

Specific tips for testing

• Testing of data is correctly loaded to the application:

  • Compare multiple rows with the original text /csv file

  • Compare total number of rows

  • Compare table column setup with definition

• Testing of a complex calculation:

  • Start by asking for test data with expected results

  • Follow the calculation definition and recreate all the individual steps

  • Have multiple examples set up for testing

  • Compare the results.