Tuesday 15 October 2013

ISO/IEC 29119 SOFTWARE TESTING STANDARD












5 comments:

  1. QA and Testing are not the same thing. QA requires products to be tested. Testing shows the delivered quality. Testing does not improve the quality, it only shows it does not meet requirements. The whole process is to give feedback so the people creating the product can improve. Quality Assurance are the guys that come up with the guidelines and procedures, those are only measures to try to improve quality by design. All things you mention containing 'development' in them have nothing to do with testing :-)

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  2. Thanks for the comment. I'm not sure if we are agreeing. Did you see my second post-it with 'Testing is not the same as Quality'?
    I understand what you mean about QA but some organisations call the testers QA engineers which complicates things no end.

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  3. I have seen the second post-it, but all other post-it's appear to be implying that software development and ISO standards have something to do with software testing. Of-course they are related but if you would look at it in a tree based view testing would be only one of the measures QA could force onto a process. But you can also do testing without QA and ISO standards. QA en ISO define approaches and processes while testing is a task. Testing can be done by anyone, but if it is done by a test-engineer it is a well defined area of expertise. What I'm trying to say here is that it appears to me that you are mixing up the QA/ISO guidelines that tell people that testing is required and the task of performing testing. Also the task testing has nothing to do with development, as you mentioned the abbreviations ending with a D (for Development).
    So Quality<>Testing, but Guidelines<>testing also and Development<>testing as well.
    Testing is like a thermometer for quality, you do it to measure if the quality attributes are on the level you want them to be.
    Testing does not improve or degrade the quality, only the feedback does that is handled by either the development-team or the business.
    Thus standards like ISO will improve quality in general and testing will only show the quality level.
    In can not decide if I agree with your statements or not, maybe you can decide after reading all of this :-)

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  4. I think we are agreeing but on slightly different points... although I don't completely agree that development <> testing (i.e. the SDLC includes testing). My main point from this blog post is that people will look at the ISO for Testing and expect companies to follow and also expect the quality of the software to improve. But like you said, following the ISO won't necessarily mean good/better testing or good/better software quality

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  5. This is a fantastic graphical narrative Andy. Brilliant work as always. Very relevant now with the #stop29119 discussions in Twitter

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