Start of the Project

Owned by Milan Poláček
Last updated: Nov 12, 2024 by Ioana Kocurova
3 min read

Here are some ideas you should consider or discuss internally or with the customer at the beginning of the project.

As QA Analyst is a standard project role, it should be always part of the project team. Therefore it is important to keep in mind several topics about QA and discuss those topics with the customer.

Important facts about QA on the project:

  • Ideal expected allocation for QA Analyst is 50% of CE allocation, but even with lower allocation, it is still possible to test a lot on the project

  • QA Analyst is focused on functional manual testing during Feature Sprints

  • Testing of Price Optimisation part should be more of customer’s responsibility, especially in terms of validating and confirming that the recommendations given by the system make sense or not. Some basic testing can be ensured from QA analyst’s side with inputs from the pricing scientist involved in the project. 

  • QA analyst can optionally be asked to conduct sprint demonstrations 

  • Main goal of QA Analyst during Feature Sprints is to find main issues and bugs before the customer will start testing

  • It is not possible to find 100% bugs during testing (never promise it to the customer) because we have limited time for testing and project has limited resources and time

  • Customer is responsible for testing during UAT phase and for acceptance of user stories

  • Test management tool is mandatory

  • Test automation could be done during Feature Sprints as a support of development, not the final version. In case the customer is interested in test automation, it should be developed after UAT phase, when the solution is stable and no major change requests are expected. Note test automation is usually not part of standard scope of QA Analyst work during Feature Sprints.

Consequences when QA Analyst is not on the project:

  • All testing activities are on customer

  • Significantly bigger risk that customer will find major issues during testing, it can lead to his lower satisfaction

  • Delay of the project because the customer will not finish UAT testing within the defined time - either because he is not ready for UAT phase in time or because he finds big amount of bugs

Tools for QA:

  • For test management - X-Ray is recommended , it is also possible to choose other tool if you prefer it. Note it is possible to use Excel, but it should be last possibility because it is not a test management tool and it can help just with test cases, not with reporting results or organizing of testing.

  • For API testing - Postman (open source, free of charge)

  • For test automation - Cypress (open source, free of charge)

  • For performance testing - JMeter (open source, free of charge)

Expectations from customer:

  • Ensure that there is representation from all business user groups during Feature Sprint testing. 

  • Ensure that internal trainings are conducted for UAT testers, ideally by the business users who are part of the feature sprint testing based on user stories during Feature Sprints and accepting user stories

  • Prepare test cases for UAT phase

  • UAT testing based on prepared test cases and reporting of test results regularly

  • Ensure UAT testers are well prepared for UAT phase. They should have time for testing every day and they should have knowledge about what is expected from them and how they should do it.

  • Prioritize your UAT test cases so you can use them also for testing after upgrades