This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
QA and Iterative Development
Carol Dippel is doing a presentation on improving the QA process for Sakai using CMM methods.
These methods assume formalized documents through out the product life-cycle. In other words it assumes the QA team will have details on what the application is supposed to do before before the test to see if it does it. Sounds obvious, but it often doesn't happen. Writing specs takes a lot of time, and it's not fun, I've been as guilty as anyone here.
There's a tendency to add in new undocumented features at the 11th hour, because it turns out to be possible. This is hell on QA. She'd rather have the newer stuff slated for a later release, say 30 days later.
She's not advocating a slow bulky 'big bang' approach with massive application releases planned a year in advance. It's that you can have small monthly releases with iterative improvements. This makes QA really workable, because the QA team can find bugs more quickly.
This sounds like an 'extreme programming' approach, nicely applied. Carol doesn't call it that b/c people use the words 'extreme programming' to justify a chaotic unplanned software development (note to self: check out this extreme programming book).
There's a lot more going on in this presentation - this was just one theme I thought was interesting.