During each phase of the development iterations we take specific measures to make sure that the product meets the industry quality standards and the customer expectations:
At this phase our QA checks whether the functional and technical designs meet the system requirements.
All discrepancies are discussed with the project lead from our side and communicated with the customer if there is a need for additional input or decisions.
Another activity during this phase is preparation of the test scenarios that will be used actively during the development, stabilization and deployment phases to ensure the functional quality of the product.
The quality control at this phase is conducted at several levels:
The source code is checked at the completion of each function to make sure that it meets our coding standards or the coding standards provided explicitly by the customer.
This way we ensure source code maintainability and improve the defects discovery as the structured code is much easier to analyze.
We have an internal requirement all source code to be tested and the code execution paths to be analyzed by the developer in charge for any pottential issues. In practice the developers test the functionality debugging the source code in step-by-step mode analyzing the possible implications.
Although we prefer the intelligent analysis made by human (developer) while doing white box testing, we also prepare automated unit tests where needed, but with an important goal in mind - the tests have to be meaningfull and maintainable.
The implemented functionality is checked daily by testers on an internal testing environment (test server) using the already prepared test scenarios for the currently completed functionality and by performing exploratory testing without predefined steps in order to find potential faults in the technical implementation or the functional design.
At this phase the testers perform throughout check of the current release candidate version and if there are defects the version is rejected and sent back to the developers. This process is repeated until the testers certify the version to be ready for release with the requirement of passing all predefined manual testing scenarios and automated tests.