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How to Control the Quality of Software Products

Cai: Cai Weidong loves testing and has more than 10 years of experience in software testing and team management.

Zheng Wenqiang, Test Architect, Alcatel-Lucent

Cai: How to grasp the quality of software products?

Zheng: It is not easy to evaluate the quality of software products, whether they are large or small, simple or complex in structure. Although difficult, evaluation of product quality is still necessary because it also involves whether the software version can be released.

Evaluate software before release

Based on my experience and that of the company, we can evaluate it in two ways.

First, quality assessment before software product release. Specific metrics include:

Defects, including the general defect distribution trend found, the distribution of defects in different functional modules, etc. For example, the general defect distribution trend graph.

Test pass rate, mainly including the planned test case execution progress, the number of test cases passed, the number of failed test cases, the number of blocked test cases, etc. The test pass rate defined in our project is 95%.

Test coverage, including test coverage of system requirements, coverage of test types. For example, our project must have requirements coverage of 100% and test type coverage of 100%.

Confidence, the subjective perception of quality by the tester responsible for this module. Some people may find it strange that subjective feelings can also be used as an evaluation of product quality. Because the engineers responsible for functional module testing know their test subjects best.

Bystanders say you can design a confidence index, say 1 to 10, and then back it up with data.

Evaluation after software release

Second, quality assessment after software product release. Our current metric is Defect Detected Percentage (DDP), which is calculated as follows:

Number of defects found at customer site/(Number of defects found by pre-release test team +

Number of defects found at customer site)*100%

We generally count the number of defects found at customer sites within 6 months of product launch. Different companies and projects use different statistical time frames.

Bystanders say it makes sense to count bugs found by customers, either to do some analysis of customers, such as frequently used features, satisfaction, etc., or to reflect on previous testing activities for improvement.

The test team provides quality information for software releases

There is another question that the test team is very concerned about: Who decides when a software product is released? From my perspective, I don't think it's appropriate for test teams to decide whether software products are released or not.

Whether a software product can be released requires the participation of different roles, evaluated according to company-defined criteria, and balanced with multiple factors such as product quality, market opportunity, product strategy, and cost. The main role of the test team in this process is to provide as much quality information, risk information, etc. of the software product as possible to help management make decisions about whether to release. Any unilateral decision may be incomplete. For example, testers feel that the quality is not good enough, and the release is risky; but the market opportunity requires us to release, and if we wait a little longer, we will weaken the market opportunity or even lose the opportunity. At this time, we need to consider which factor has higher priority.

The observer said: Agree. Software release should be considered in conjunction with a variety of factors, not just a role.

This article is excerpted from Win in Testing 2: An Interview with Chinese Software Testing Experts.

by Cai Weidong

Electronic Industry Press

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