How and When Testing Starts

For the betterment, reliability and performance of an Information System, it is always better to involve the
Testing team right from the beginning of the Requirement Analysis phase. The active involvement of the
testing team will give the testers a clear vision of the functionality of the system by which we can expect a
better quality and error-free product.
Once the Development Team-lead analyzes the requirements, he will prepare the System Requirement
Specification, Requirement Traceability Matrix. After that he will schedule a meeting with the Testing Team
(Test Lead and Tester chosen for that project). The Development Team-lead will explain regarding the
Project, the total schedule of modules, Deliverable and Versions.
The involvement of Testing team will start from here. Test Lead will prepare the Test Strategy and Test
Plan, which is the scheduler for entire testing process. Here he will plan when each phase of testing such
as Unit Testing, Integration Testing, System Testing, User Acceptance Testing. Generally Organizations
follow the V Model for their development and testing.
After analyzing the requirements, Development Team prepares System Requirement Specification,
Requirement Traceability Matrix, Software Project Plan, Software Configuration Management Plan,
Software Measurements/metrics plan, Software Quality Assurance Plan and move to the next phase of
Software Life Cycle ie., Design. Here they will prepare some important Documents like Detailed Design
Document, Updated Requirement Traceability Matrix, Unit Test Cases Document (which is prepared by
the Developers if there are no separate White-box testers), Integration Test Cases Document, System
Test Plan Document, Review and SQA audit Reports for all Test Cases.
After preparation of the Test Plan, Test Lead distributes the work to the individual testers (white-box
testers & black-box testers). Testers work will start from this stage, based on Software Requirement
Specification/Functional Requirement Document they will prepare Test Cases using a standard Template
or Automation Tool. After that they will send them for review to the Test Lead. Once the Test Lead
approves it, they will prepare the Test Environment/Test bed, which is specifically used for Testing.
Typically the Test Environment replicates the Client side system setup. We are ready for Testing. While
testing team will work on Test strategy, Test plan, Test Cases simultaneously the Development team will
work on their individual Modules. Before three or four days of First Release they will give an interim
Release to the Testing Team. They will deploy that software in Test Machine and the actual testing will
start. The Testing Team handles configuration management of Builds.
After that the Testing team do testing against Test Cases, which are already prepared and report bugs in
a Bug Report Template or automation Tool (based on Organization). They will track the bugs by changing
the status of Bug at each and every stage. Once Cycle #1 testing is done, then they will submit the Bug
Report to the Test Lead then he will discuss these issues with Development Team-lead after which they
work on those bugs and will fix those bugs. After all the bugs are fixed they will release next build. The
Cycle#2 testing starts at this stage and now we have to run all the Test Cases and check whether all the
bugs reported in Cycle#1 are fixed or not.
And here we will do regression testing means, we have to check whether the change in the code give any
side effects to the already tested code. Again we repeat the same process till the Delivery Date. Generally
we will document 4 Cycles information in the Test Case Document. At the time of Release there should
not be any high severity and high priority bugs. Of course it should have some minor bugs, which are
going to be fixed in next iteration or release (generally called Deferred bugs). And at the end of Delivery
Test Lead and individual testers prepare some reports. Some times the Testers also participate in the

Code Reviews, which is static testing. They will check the code against historical logical errors checklist,
indentation, proper commenting. Testing team is also responsible to keep the track of Change
management to give qualitative and bug-free product.