QA Documentation

QA Department should document tasks and processes raised during its activity. This allows QA Manager to review and utilize these tasks and related documentation in a productive manner. In addition, this valued information can be helpful in the future by giving insights to issues that have been resolved already. The function of documentation assumes the processes of digitizing, cataloguing, storing and preserving all documents and related materials raised during the activity of QA Department. This function is necessary to store workflow documents and retrieve them anytime it requires to initiate a new project or a process in QA Department. The goal of the documentation function is to document all processes within QA Department. All data collected during a process are gathered and documented. When a process is finished, the documents are moved to archive and can be restored anytime for future usage. For example, let's see how this function is applied to the process of test ing a product.

Verification and validation

Before beginning the test ing, QA Department conducts verification and validation. QA verification process is a preventing mechanism aimed to find potential failures in the project documentation before the test ing begins. It involves discussions, reviews, examinations, etc. QA validation process occurs after verification. This process is aimed to approve functionality, standards, calculations, and solutions stated in the specifications, requirements and other documents.

Test Case document

An example of QA document is a test case. Test case is a document of QA Department that describes action or event and expected result to define if features of the product work properly. Test cases help reveal problems in the requirements or design of the product. It is useful to prepare and plan test cases beforehand on the initial phase of the project life cycle if possible. For a typical project, the test case may contain some particulars such as the following:

• test case identifier
• test case name
• objective
• test setup
• input data requirements
• instructions and steps
• expected results

This is a common structure of the test case. It can vary depending on the enterprise specialization and project context. The employees involved in the planning of test cases can use VIP Task Manager to create detailed list of actions. For example, QA Supervisor can create a task group "Test case #A" which would contain such tasks as "Setting test case identifier and name", "Setting test case objective", "Test setup", and other. All required documentation can be attached to the tasks as files or links.