Have you ever been asked if you can achieve zero bugs in a product? A younger me would have laughed and said it’s not possible, but not all projects are the same. We once worked on a military project where budgeting is on another level and where there was no expense spared starting from documentation and planning (both under heavy testing and monitoring). Or you might be dealing with the medical industry, where a bug doesn’t mean an angry customer but the difference between life and death.

It is always crucial to test new functionality as soon as possible to make sure it does not have a negative impact on the existing features. Our experience has shown that continuous integration is a viable approach when developing complex embedded systems. It usually means that you must invest effort in developing an integrated Automated Build System (ABS) and an Automated Testing System (ATS), but it also results in less effort required for testing and bug fixing. This approach enabled us to create high quality and reliable solutions.

We live in a world where time is money. The world of IT is no exception to this and it might even be said that it is setting the standard for the saying. To get as much return on your investment as possible, you want a product that is solid so it will need as little bug fixing as possible. Fixing a bug takes manpower and that costs money.

In the agile approach test engineers will be working as a part of their scrum teams and they can easily become isolated from other test community. What to do? Build your QA Guild!

Everybody is talking about test engineers as part of Scrum teams, but what happened to the test team? Is there a place for a test team in the Agile world? Although there is no discrete test team in the Scrum framework, you still have some options for organizing your test engineers, supporting them and helping them exchange knowledge and best practices.

But let’s go back to the beginning …