REST ASSURED

Welcome to "Rest Assured", quality rants by Opera's Quality Assurance department.

My name is Snorre M. Grimsby, and I am the head of Opera's QA department. We would like to tell the world more about what testers and QA engineers at Opera do, and also discuss more general quality assurance issues. Therefore, posts on this blog will relate less to specific Opera products and technologies (and/or the testing of them). In other words, this is not the place to report bugs.

So, who are we?

Today, we have people in seven of Opera's offices, organized in five sub-departments to align with our development lifecycle. We are responsible for testing and assuring the quality of all Opera deliveries and technologies, from Core versions to end-user and business products.

What is testing?

Internally, we use this definition of testing:

Testing

Activities, including development of test-supporting tools and systems, that directly or indirectly examine, observe, or evaluate (without access to the source code) the state (for example quality, usability, operability, compatibility, accessibility) of features and functions in the Opera browser.

Activities that fall under the definition would be

• Planning and managing testing of products
• Writing, reviewing, and running test suites
• Web compatibility and interoperability verification
• Tracking, analysis, and assignment of all reported defects

We also develop, deploy, maintain, and administrate testing infrastructures, tools, and systems.

Beyond testing

We often say that [t]he object of good testing is to find as many bugs as possible, and that [t]he object of good quality assurance is to find as few bugs as possible. What we mean by that, of course, is that testing is about detection and that quality assurance is about prevention. Work on process improvements (SPI), therefore, also falls under our QA department.

But our responsibilities actually go beyond testing and quality assurance:

• Reading, reviewing, and writing specifications
• Setting up non-testing infrastructures and systems (e.g. guidelines)
• Internal, customer, and public technical and non-technical documentation
• End-user and customer support and community interaction
• Product localization

If you have an interest in Web technologies, software testing, and/or quality assurance, we hope that you will find this a blog worth subscribing to.