Software development and quality assurance

Back in the days, when software development started to be structured and development teams grew, the waterfall methodology ruled. Today, that methodology has mostly been replaced by agile counterparts that include highly iterative approaches to the work. What has changed is the iterative and shortcut behavior among the tasks involved along with their iterative frequency. It is not uncommon to perform several iterations per day in modern development teams.

No matter what the methodology is, we perform some kind of analysis (requirement, architectural) in software development from which design and implementation phases follow. After, and often during the implementation phase, unit tests are run.

The unit test should be on a functional level, verifying the smallest building blocks in code, such as specific functions or methods within a class. These tests are normally run by the individual developer and are also advantageous to automate in order to run during daily/nightly builds.

Higher levels of tests include the following:

• System tests: These tests are used to verify a system as whole
• Integration tests: These tests are used to verify integration points between two or more components or systems
• Acceptance tests: These tests are used for the final verification by the product owner before or during the deployment in a production environment

Most of these tests should be automated and run with live data as soon as possible. Note that both combinations and other variants of tests can exist in different organizations depending on various needs, organizational, or other inherited reasons.

All these types of tests are commonly part of a well-run business' QA process, but they are also heavily entwined in the software development process as the knowledge and cooperation from both IT and QA staff are required. This is all good, but what about performance tests and performance tuning?

Naturally, performance testing should be included as a compulsory step in the software development process and the results thereof should simultaneously be an integral part of the QA process. The ownership might be arguable, but the important thing is that it gets done, and gets done well. The exact location of when to do performance testing will, however, need a bit more discussion.