DataPath's Quality Assurance Department has recently been established to bring the testing, documentation, and training of new programs or enhancements under one department. The Department's Quality Assurance Analysts are now responsible for the final testing and system release.

Quality Assurance is also responsible for educating the Sales and Customer Service staff on the new product (whether it is a new program or an enhancement) and supporting DataPath's Maintenance and Customer Service Departments by answering any questions or assisting with client issues.

Department Duties

Among Quality Assurance's duties are:

• Providing internal training and support to the Sales staff, Customer Service Department, and other stakeholders,
• Being directly involved in the alpha and beta testing prior to general release,
• Creating and executing test scripts,
• Assisting in writing functional specification documents (from the end-user perspective) for new enhancements,
• Updating documentation for existing products, creating "What's New" documentation to explain changes, and writing documentation for new products,
• Preparing and maintaining test environment consisting of sufficient information to test all functionality, and
• Creating regression test scripts.

Product Testing

Following are the tests performed, as needed, on new products.

Regression Testing.  Regression Testing is performed for enhancements to existing programs. The QA Analysts check to see that existing functionality is not lost or negatively impacted by programming changes.

Usability Testing.  Usability testing is conducted to answer such questions as: Is the new programming user-friendly? Does it flow well from page to page or screen to screen? Is it usable with the current client hardware setup? Included in the Usability testing are:

• Presentation Testing.  Testing of the visual display, spelling, language, and punctuation.
• Standards Testing.  Testing against DataPath's product-specific standards. For instance, do the display screens meet that product's standards?
• System Testing.  Verifying that any hardware employed with the product continues to function after the programming change.

Functional Testing.  When performing Functional Testing, the QA Analysts verify that the product's existing functionality is not lost or is negatively impacted by programming changes.

Security Testing.  During Security Testing, the QA Analysts verify that access to screens/pages or data is secured as expected based on the security configuration for the product.

Performance Testing.  QA Analysts check the product's performance by using the product under various load/stress situations based on number of users and data volume.

A new product will not be released to our users unless the above testing has been completed, and a QA Analyst has signed off that the testing was completed in compliance with DataPath's standard and any resulting issues were resolved.