TEAM Zarate Tarrani Notes From the Field

Milestones, Quality, Tools & a Promise. The milestone first: Happy birthday Marcia Hopkins! Marcia is one of those rare people who is skilled in instructing, process analysis, technical writing and web page design. She is also blessed with with the ability and talent to also produce sparkling prose in her creative writing endeavors. When was the last time you met an IT professional who could write, present and code?

The fruits of last night's research include manuals that will warm the heart of any SQA practitioner. I've also unearthed some amazing tools, and have gathered material that I'll dole out over the next few days.

Quality. On 19 April 2001 I reviewed a book on Amazon titled Software Error Analysis. The book is, in my opinion, outstanding, but that alone isn't remarkable. The reason I'm mentioning the book is because you can read it online as well as download a copy in PDF format. Isn't it nice to have choices?

That book came from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) High Integrity Software Systems Assurance Group. There are two more documents from that group that are worth their weight in gold to SQA professionals:

1. Software Quality Assurance: Documentation and Reviews
2. Quality Characteristics and Metrics for Reusable Software

I also came across an interesting MS Word document about test frameworks that has interesting ideas you may want to incorporate into your test process.

Tools. NIST has a collection of web tools that are publicly available for download. These tools are a part of the NIST Web Metrics Testbed, which is designed to explore the feasibility of a range of tools and techniques that support rapid, remote, and automated testing and evaluation of website usability.

Also available are a collection of web metrics papers developed by NIST and a comprehensive list of web usability resources.

Promise. Tomorrow I'm going to provide material and tools on XML conformance testing, including a test suite. In the meantime you can read the XML Conformance Testing presentation in PowerPoint format.

The sun has finally burned off the haze here in Tustin, California and I'm going to enjoy the sunshine, a good book and an espresso.