Roles and Responsibilities in Software Testing Team

The different roles and responsibilities for a QA/Testing Team are as:

1.Test Lead/Test  Manager:

The different responsibilities for  Test Lead/Test Manager are:

 - Understanding and analyzing requirements.

 - Risk Analysis.

 - Preparation of Traceability Matrix document.

 - Defining Testing Environment.

 - Evaluate Exit  Criteria for testing.

 - Preparing Test Summary Report.

 - Interacting with customers whenever required.

 - Selection of Test Tools in case of Automation testing.

2.Software Test Engineer/Software Tester:

The different responsibilities for  Software Test Engineer are:

 - Understanding requirements.

 - Documenting test cases.

 - Reporting Defects.

 - Performing regression testing.

 - Collecting test data.

 - Contribute to test plan preparation if required.

- Updating Traceability matrix document.

3.Automation Tester:

The different responsibilities for  Automation Test Engineer are:

 - Selecting test cases for automation.

 - Deciding the framework.

 - Selecting test cases for regression testing.

 - Analyzing  test results.

- Reporting defects.

- Writing Test scripts.

- Maintenance of testing resources.

4.Database Tester:

The different responsibilities for  Database Tester are:

 - Verifying data integrity.

 - Identifying database test scenarios.

 - Verifying stored procedures.

 - Verifying backup and recovery operations.

 - Verifying triggers.

What is Recovery Testing?

Recovery testing ensures that the system is able to recover from different degree of failures.

This testing ensures the system recovers from crashes like hardware failure,or other catastrophic problems.

This testing is basically done to check how fast system recovers from any type of crash the system has faced.

This testing is also called as Reliability Testing.In this the test engineer validates whether application can also recover from abnormal situations.

Example: Network disconnect,process power  failure etc.

Smoke Testing Vs Sanity Testing

Smoke Testing	Sanity Testing
1.Smoke testing is performed to confirm critical functionalities are working fine.	1.Sanity testing is performed to check new functionality/bug has been fixed.
2.It is usually documented.	2.It is usually not documented.
3.It verifies stability of system.	3.It verifies rationality of system.
4.It is performed by developers or testers.	4.It is performed by testers.
5.It is general health checkup.	5.It is specialized health checkup.
6.It is part of acceptance testing.	6.It is subset of regression testing.

 

What is Sanity Testing?

Sanity Testing is subset of Regression Testing.Sanity Testing is verifying the "Rationality" of the system.

After receiving a software build with minor changes in functionality or code sanity testing is performed to ensure that the bugs have been fixed and no further issues are introduced due to these changes.The goal is to determine that the proposed functionality is working roughly as expected.If sanity test fails build is rejected to save the time.

Sanity testing is usually not documented.

Example: 

 Suppose if a project consists of different modules like Login,User Detail,Task Creation.Now in the login page if the username field accepts less than 8 alpha numeric in username text box which is against the requirement thus leading it to a bug.So the bug is raised by testing team to the development team.After the bug is fixed by development team the testing team checks the other modules to ensure that there are no changes in another modules.We ensure that we as a testing team do not perform in depth testing of other modules because of short time.

Sanity Testing is usually performed by Software Testers.

What is Smoke Testing?

Smoke Testing name emerged from hardware testing,when we get new hardware and power it on and if smoke comes we will not proceed with testing.

Smoke Testing is also called as Build Verification Testing(BVT).

Smoke testing ensures that whether the build can be accepted for testing or not.Basically it checks the stability of the build.Smoke testing is performed to ensure that critical functionalities are working fine.We do not perform detailed testing.

The purpose of smoke testing is to reject a badly broken application so that testing team does not waste any time.Smoke testing is done to check normal health of  an application and also ensures we can do further testing.This testing is usually scripted.

eg.

Suppose we have Employee Management system which contains Employee module and Admin module.For this application we can perform smoke testing by ensuring all the major functionalities like New Employee is able to login,whether all the screens are available etc.