You are here: Development Standards > Quality Assurance

# Quality Assurance

The purpose of the quality assurance process is to ensure a high-quality product. The process is generally divided into three phases: design, testing and acceptance.

Quality Assurance (QA) becomes involved in a project during the development design phase. QA participation in the design phase provides product development with support in identifying areas where product standards are not being followed, problems with data flow or follow-through to interfacing applications exist, and where the application is not user friendly. QA also helps ensure that development specifications contain information needed to draw up accurate and thorough test plans. While the software is being developed, QA prepares test strategies and writes the test plan, which includes the creation of test cases and checklists.

The testing phase begins when Software Development finishes coding and testing the product. Testing consists of system testing and acceptance testing.

During system testing, QA examines such things as the accounting flow, documentation, and user interface. During testing, all problems, from catastrophic errors to typographical errors, are documented in the QATR Tracking Database System.

QA tests software in rounds on a fixed set of media. A round begins when Software Development submits a product for a QA test cycle. QA ends a round when the QA test cycle is completed successfully, or when it cannot continue because of software problems. If a round ends because of software problems, Software Development fixes the problems based on information in the QATRs and submits the updated software to QA for another test round. QA reviews the QATRs and performs tests to verify that all the problems reported by QATRs have been fixed. If QA discovers new problems, Software Development fixes the problems and another round begins. This process continues until the software is free of known bugs.

Acceptance testing begins when the software is sent to selected beta sites for testing. At this point QA and Software Development have tested all the functional aspects of the software and fixed the major issues. The beta sites are asked to convert live databases and begin running parallel data entry. The controlled release begins when feedback from the live testing warrants further use. The QA process ends and the product is considered ready for general release when the controlled release group confirms that the software is ready for expanded use. The software is then handed off for production.