11 Fundamental Truths about Requirements

April 28, 2022

The need for good requirements in our projects is essential, and there seems to be some misunderstanding about why. Although the Business Analyst (BA) elicits the requirements for our projects, I am including it in the Quality Assurance (QA) section because we work very close together in this space. And getting good requirements is critically […]

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Introducing QA Part 4: How Can QA Help You?

March 31, 2021

Welcome to the final article of the Introducing QA series. If you read the preceding articles in this series, and I hope you did, you know that QA has to do with improving processes and testing. And you know that quality is a moving target. Our intention is to improve the quality of your next […]

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Introducing QA Part 3: What is Testing?

March 10, 2021

  The essential mission of testing is always the same; to answer this question… Are there problems that threaten the on-time, successful completion of our project? There have been thousands of books written about testing over the years, and I could list over 100 types of testing that are described in those books. But that […]

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Introducing QA Part 2: What is Quality?

March 2, 2021

“Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.” – T. DeMarco and T. Lister In part 1 of this series, What is QA?, we talked about Quality Assurance (QA) and how it means different things to different people. Other factors for these different meanings are the many definitions […]

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Introducing QA Part 1: What is QA?

February 19, 2021

What is QA? “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of meeting the schedule has been forgotten.”  -Anonymous Hello! My name is Mick Stevens and I am the Quality Assurance (QA) person in the Project Management Office (PMO). The PMO is currently focusing on ways to provide more value to projects within […]

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Reflections from My First Testing Conference

September 23, 2019

And what I really learned… On August 14th and 15th, I attended my first testing conference, ever. Even though testing has always been part of my 30+ year career, I have never had an official testers role. I never even thought of myself as a tester until now. I went to this conference with the […]

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On Requirements and Test Cases

May 31, 2019

This month, I want to shed a little more light on requirements and test cases. The general consensus seems to be that requirements, at least, should be 100% complete early on in the project, but that is not always the case. Both test cases and requirements are continually refined as we learn more about the […]

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Good Questions Lead to Good Ideas

April 11, 2019

This month I’m including a follow-up post to the one from February, Why Do We Need QA Involved So Early….  This post was written by Michael Bolton and talks about more questions that testers can ask, but these questions are not just limited to testers. These are questions that all stakeholders should be thinking about. As […]

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Best Practices

March 18, 2019

I have seen a lot of confusion around the term, “best Practices” lately. In testing, this confusion usually results in many hours of unnecessary work, which also results in project delays. When project groups are asking for best practices in a new process, what they are really asking for is how other universities are doing […]

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Why Do We Need QA Involved So Early in the Project?

February 22, 2019

Yes it is necessary! Early on in my role as QA Analyst, I saw first hand the pitfalls of getting QA involved in a project too late. After all, it’s common knowledge that testing is not needed until the end of the project… Right?   Wrong!  The project was about 75% complete when I came on […]

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