How to Track the Software Quality of Product

Introduction

In this article you will learn how to track software quality. You will learn analysis & learn that there are various ways to track software quality and that various tools are available in the market. Here I am describing this topic using Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.

How to track software quality of a product

Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate can be used to help track the quality of products that you are verifying and to validate/test them using Microsoft Test Manager.

You can verify which builds have bug fixes, new requirements, change requests or new features and user stories added.



If the application that you are testing is built using Team Foundation Build, the changes between two builds can be determined using Microsoft Test Manager 2010.

You must decide whether you should begin to use a different build of the application for your testing, based on what has changed.

For example, if you are aware that a new build has a bug fix for an issue that is blocking many of your tests, you should decide to assign the build to use with your test plan.

You can also get recommendations about which tests might have to be rerun, based on the effect of code changes that have been made to your application if you are using a test impact analysis when you run your tests.

Tracking Bugs

You can track defects/bugs found in your product or application under test. You can measure your software quality, based on these bug defects found in the application. You can triage these defects or bugs on the basis of priority & severity, assign the bugs and determine whether the bug defects can be fixed.



Sometimes it is also probable that the defects or bugs need more information, or the bug is actually the intended behavior for the product or application.

You can review your bugs and decide the next steps for the bug. You might want to reassign the bug, change the priority, or you might determine that it is not a bug or that it will not be fixed.

View Reports to Help You Track Your Testing Progress

In accumulation, you can view the reports on the readiness of your test cases; view the progress that you are doing in your test plan, Manual & Automated Test Activities, Test Failure Activity and run queries to review specific data for your team project that relates to requirements, test cases and defects/ bugs.



If your team uses a project portal, you can view the predefined reports on the Test Dashboard. You can access the project portal from the Track view in the Testing Center for Microsoft Test Manager.





Use Standard and Custom Queries for Reporting

You can use existing queries to report on test cases and bugs. You can also create your own custom queries for reporting purposes.