3.3 QA Workflow

There are four levels of performance testing for the stori.es platform:

smoke testing
feature-specific testing
bug reporting and resolution
exhaustive, whole-platform review

Smoke testing. This test is performed first after every deploy to ensure that the most important functions of the platform behave as expected. It includes checks on questionnaire performance, story submission, user login, platform navigation, detail page availability (include: documents section, edit section), embed questionnaires. The smoke test is generally autonomous and unrelated to specific tasks. It is immediately followed by various feature and page-specific testing.
Feature-specific testing. As system features are added or updated, they must be carefully tested and all related platform elements must be reviewed by QA personnel. Feature updates are tracked as “issues”, and most of these issues require QA sign-off before they can be closed.
Bug reporting and resolution. Platform bugs are reported by the client, developers and most often, by the QA team. Once a bug has been addressed by developers, it is assigned to QA for testing. If the bug can no longer be reproduced, QA closes the issue.
Whole-platform review. Whole-platform testing occurs alongside all other testing and includes a comprehensive evaluation of the entire stori.es platform. Because updates and bug fixes can affect seemingly unrelated elements of the system, whole-platform testing is necessary to identify unexpected bugs as the result of recent changes.

The QA team is responsible for performing smoke tests, feature-specific tests and bug reporting and resolution on the QA server (y) before every deploy to the production server (z).

After the deploy, QA also performs smoke tests on z using a test organization.

Additionally, QA tracks bugs and feature updates throughout the deployment schedule as well as maintaining an ongoing whole-platform review on y.