I’m now back working in QA with a real development team on a great project (as opposed to the business side development I was doing, for a group that lived for the “down and dirty” approach to everything). The new project has all the usual issues with managing client expectations, trying to catch up when you are brought in late, and working with new technologies. The wonderful opportunity, though, is that it is a relatively agile project team, working for a dedicatedly waterfall client, and I am the first QA person most of the developers have worked with on anything other than a regular waterfall project. I have a lot of room to try new things to bridge this gap between agile and waterfall approaches, so it is a terrific challenge.
So far, I have come up with a UAT process that maps to the 6 week incremental releases and a session based testing process for the 2 week iterations that brings the BAs in to the loop. So far, the client and team responses have been terrific. My next big hurdle is to come up with a way the client will be comfortable with of organizing and documenting the automated integration tests, without dedicating large amounts of time for maintenance. I’m limited to open source or otherwise free tools due to the client’s government budget, and have not yet found a tool to support test case management that has the right level of flexibility vs. ease of use. Since it looks like these tests will be the most detailed documentation we will be providing the client, they need to be in a format that is organized and approachable, so large buckets of code will not work. Suggestions are welcome!
