dilton_dalton
Profile Answers by dilton_dalton

Dec 9th, 2007

For the purposes of SQA, Mercury products are best used to under the legs of unsteady tables to keep them from rocking.
The question makes no sense. Mercury produces software testing tools. Software Quality Assurance and testing are not related. You may as well ask about the best practices of fishermen or coal miners using Mercury products.
Quality Assurance, as the term implies, is the provision of assurance, normally to project level and senior management but often to customers, that the product being developed will exhibit adequate reliability, and will be delivered on time and within budget. If the Quality Assurance people do not think this is going to be the case, their job is to provide warnings to management regarding the expected problems so that management can take action. Note that SQA is a forward looking activity. Quality Assurance depends on data collected and reported by the the project participants during the execution of the development. The objective of QA is to help reduce costs and help improve the delivered product.
Testing can only be carried out once a product, or part thereof, has been built. At that point, if a serious quality related problem surfaces, it is too late for management to do anything about it. Testing is a backward looking activity. It is also a costly activity. If enough testing and fixing is to be done to significantly improve the reliability of the product, the cost of the development project will be increased substantially as will the duration. It is very easy to show, that for any non-trivial software system, the cost of significantly improving reliability by testing is simply not economically feasible. Testing is exactly the opposite of quality assurance. It destroys value.
The only real use of so called "QA Testing" in software development is to verify that what the QA people said during the development was true. This is done by determining how easy it is to detect defects by testing. It normally doesn't take very long or very much testing to establish a defect discovery rate. The lower the discovery rate, the better the product.
If this question is asked at a job interview, it is a strong indication that the interviewer does not understand the issues involved. If you accept a job with such an organization, you can be reasonably sure that they will deliver buggy products and that sooner or later they will have economic problems related to selling or maintaining their products. You can expect to be looking for another position in the future.