Zephyr as applied to Waterfall
Last Updated on Monday, 12 September 2011 20:13 Written by Ivo Verlaek Monday, 12 September 2011 19:58
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See also: Agile, Waterfall, V-Model, Hybrid Model
Zephyr with its flexible design, easily fits and enhances any test methodology that you might be using as part of your software development lifecycle: Waterfall, Agile, V-Model or a Hybrid.
Zephyr is organized into multiple, logical areas - Department, Projects, Releases/Iterations and has applications in each area that allow for the rigidity of a process flow while keeping the overall model flexible to accommodate changes. This approach leads to effective management of every aspect of your testing department, while giving enhanced productivity and efficiency gains to all members of the department in their day-to-day activities.
The Waterfall approach to software development has the following salient aspects:
- It boasts a structured, well documented and disciplined process
- While being non-iterative, it allows multiple projects to run in parallel
- It is predictive and largely used for more stable projects
For its part, Testing has its own stage within this process and benefits largely from the above. Using Zephyr as a Test Management System in such an environment is very beneficial and the above diagram shows the correlation between the various stages and the appropriate applications within Zephyr.
How Zephyr integrates with this process
For departments employing the Waterfall process, Zephyr is set up to have multiple releases within each project. For each release, during the Requirements Stage requirements documents are created by the Business and these are linked or uploaded within the Documents application. The Test Case Repository is then set up appropriately to track major/minor requirements as well as address all aspects of a Test Plan including the various phases of testing (Acceptance, Functionality, Regression, Integration etc.). Based on the requirements and the design documentation/POCs available during the Design Stage, detailed test cases are created by various testers assigned to this release and a review process set up.
Once the test cases have been authored and reviewed and the software is ready to exit the Development Stage, a detailed Test Execution schedule is created and appropriate assignments to different testers done. Now, test case execution begins in earnest and the test-file-fix-retest loop is put in place with the Testcase Execution and Defect Tracking applications.
Zephyr tracks everything automatically and produces live metrics on all key aspects of the testing cycle - test case creation, coverage, test execution progress and defects - thereby allowing Managers and Leads to make productivity of the team and quality statements about the software under test.
