Help your project manager to decide about shipment


Project Manger: can we ship our new release on this weekend?
QA: hmm, well, there are few critical bugs that are show stopper. if we ship the code to the client, we will suffer a lot in the production support.
Project Manager: ok, let me talk to Dev TL

This conversation is a part of our professional life and we often come across such statements. The job of software testers/Quality engineer is to find bugs but there are some other important things that can add value to over all products like

Block premature product releases.
This tester stops premature shipment by finding bugs so serious that no one would ship the product until they are fixed. For every release decision meeting, the tester’s goal is to have new showstopper bugs.
Help managers make ship / no-ship decisions.
Managers are typically concerned with risk in the field. They want to know about coverage (maybe not the simplistic code coverage statistics, but some indicators of how much of the product has been addressed and how much is left), and how important the known problems are. Problems that appear significant on paper but will not lead to customer dissatisfaction are probably not relevant to the ship decision.
Minimize technical support costs.
Working in conjunction with a technical support or help desk group, the test team identifies the issues that lead to calls for support. These are often peripherally related to the product under test.

I think it is quite important that quality engineer should know about the overall status of the release, about its stability, and helping project mangers and other stake holders in making decision about the shipment of release

I have taken these testing objectives from Cem kaner article “What is a good test case”.You can consult in case of further reading

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