What is Quality Assurance?
The product life cycle can be complicated and must incorporate a number of different
stages that a product will traverse between. Quality Assurance is the act
of managing the product life cycle process and the individual stages therein.
The aim of quality assurance is to ensure that the following conditions are met :
- the final product meets the initial specifications of the design.
- the final product is stable and finished on time.
- the final product meets the user needs and expectations.
The life cycle consists of traversing through a set of stages. These stages are
orderred, however, it is quite common for a product to step backwards as new information
becomes available. Life cycles can be further divided into model types :
- Continuous Method :
The life cycle forms a continuous loop of endless revisions and product updates for
a product that continually improves itself. This is very effective when specifications
are well known at the start of development of each revision.
- Rapid Application Development :
Continuous iteration produces a more complicated prototype or beta version, with each
pass through the cycle. This model is very effective for determining limits and modeling
a product whose specification is not completely known at the start of development.
The individual stages of either model, generally include the following :
QA Process
Problems can arise at any stage in this process, and they generally require communication
between people working on different activities. Fast BugTrack allows these issues to
be enterred into a tracking system where all issues can be maintained and properly
handled. Management can keep a handle on all issues in the entire life of the product.
As deadlines approach, outstanding issues are available to be sorted. Each of which
contains a status and history in the system.