This is no bad thing: developers
are trying to get something working and the testers are trying to show it doesn??™t. The keys to success
are patience, a sense of humor, clear definitions of responsibilities, a plan, and good staff. So what else is new?
These roles are shown in simplified form in Figure 1.3. They depend on two distinctions being drawn:
1. Between the quality assurance and quality control roles of the QA department, and the testers
2. Between the testing and development roles
6 I??™m sure you can guess why.
14 Manage Software Testing
If the roles in your project differ greatly from those shown above ask yourself what the political and
technical effects of those differences will be, and plan accordingly. The next section explains why.
1.10 Quality Assurance and Quality Control
Many problems arise in software development because these two activities are confused. The confusion
arises for historical and practical reasons:
??? Quality control is concerned with controlling the quality of some products of some processes, be
they documents, software, or motor cars. It is concerned to find bugs, and in so doing assure7
management and the customer that the product (specifications, code, plans, manuals) is correct.
??? Quality assurance is concerned with looking at the process by which the products are produced.
Quality assurance staff may not be technical experts in the area of the project they are monitoring,
in fact it??™s probably better that they aren??™t; otherwise they might be tempted to get involved in the
technical details and lose the big picture.
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