Some Less Talked Best Practices of QA and Testing

I have found the following best practices for
QA and Testing.

This mainly highlights the better inclusion of
QA group into the projects by the other project
related members.

I have added some of the extractions from the
source document as well.


1) Involve testers early in the development
cycle:

One director of quality management says his
quality assurance workers meet with business
analysts and business users before developers
even start writing code—while requirements are
being written—to determine what requirements
they ought to test and to develop test cases
for each requirement.

2) Establish quality checkpoints or milestones
  throughout the entire development cycle.
  Model company is e-Bay:

e-Bay's first milestone occurs when the QA and
product development groups review requirements.
The second milestone occurs before development
ends, when e-Bay's product development and
project management groups review the QA team's
test plan to make sure it's adequate. Just
before QA begins testing, the third checkpoint
occurs as the development group shows QA that
their code meets all functional and business
requirements.

3) Write a tech guide:

A lot of the problems that come up when
you're testing software are a result of people
not knowing the right way to do certain things.
If anyone has a question about the best way to
approach a specific task, they can refer to the
tech guide without having to request for
continuous knowledge transfers.

4) Centralize your test groups:

Centralizing testers into one group—as opposed
to staffing testers by application area—ensures
that testers share best practices and lessons
learned when they come off a project.

5) Raise testers' awareness of their value:

Highlighting the importance of their work
and the impact it has on the company improves
their morale and makes them approach their
job with even more diligence.

6) Cross-train developers and testers in
each other's roles:
Cross-training is an excellent way to foster
understanding between testers and developers
and thus improve relations between the two
groups.