Role of a Test Analyst in different phases of SDLC

(Q). What is the role of a Test Analyst in different phases of sdlc?

Software Testers are involved in identifying test conditions and creating test designs, test cases, test procedure specifications and test data, and may automate or help to automate the tests.

Requirement: Tester understands the requirements and analyse the requirements and also checks whether given requirements are testable requirements or not. If the tester finds any defects in requirements, the tester directly reports those defects.

Design Phase: In this phase, the tester identifying high-level test Condition and test cases for given requirements and develops test scenarios and test cases and preparing test data if necessary.

Build Phase: In this phase, tester do the static testing like design review, test cases review, checking we cove all requirements or we miss any requirements.

Testing Phase: In this phase actually we execute the test cases, log results and if any test case is failed we have to report the defect using any defect management tool after fixing those defect again retest those defect to ensure that the defect is fixed or not. If not again reopen the defect. After finishing all test cases our test manager will sign off on the testing.

Role of a Business Analyst in different phases of SDLC

(Q). What is the role of a Business Analyst in different phases of SDLC?
In Software development life-cycle a Business Analyst is closely related with each of the steps involved in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The series of steps which involves a BA in the SDLC process are as follows:

Planning Phase:
At first when a prospective project is put forth in front of the team, the Project Manager, Business Analyst and the Technical Architect is involved in the Initiation and Planning phase. Key points for discussion are as follows:

• Feasibility of the project?

• Will the project be profitable?

• Technical challenges?

• Project technical risks?

Requirement Analysis:

In this phase a Business Analyst is heavily involved in making appointments with the client and start with interviewing them about the requirement of the project. This process is commonly known as Requirement gathering. This is where the BA will also use their modelling skills to document business requirements and prioritize activities. The information gathered is documented using MS Word or any similar software to represent use cases, use case diagram, activity diagram and data flow diagram etc.

Design and Development: The requirements have now been designed into a solution which is being implemented. The Business Analyst doesn’t have much to do in this phase. At times, it can happen that the BA is asked to clarify requirements or in certain Agile Scrum projects the business analyst will be asked to review prototypes. Business analyst should frequently have meeting with the team or developer in case of clarification to ensure that the project is on the right track. 

Testing and Implementation: During the Testing and Implementation phase the Business Analyst can assist with reviewing the test scripts to ensure all functional requirements are being tested. The BA can also make use of a Tractability Matrix to trace the requirements during implementation. After which the project is sent for User Acceptance Testing, in which business analyst makes an appointment with client and the client performs a sanity check. In case of bugs the project is sent back to the development team, else client will accept the project and beta version is implemented.

(Q). What is the role of a developer in different phases of sdlc?

The Software Developers (front-end and back-end) are responsible for using the technical requirements from the Technical Lead to create cost and timeline estimates.
The Software Developers are also responsible for building the deliverable and communicating the status of the software project to the Technical Lead or Project Manager.
It is critical that the other team members effectively communicate the technical requirements to the Software Developers to reduce project risk and provide the software project with the greatest chance of success.

Why do we need a separate environment for developers and testers

(Q). Why do we need a separate environment for developers and testers?

Because developers have often lot of other tools running on their environments which might affect the outcome of the test and hence needs to be separated from a test environment.
A test environment would be setup as close to the production as possible so as to ensure good quality testing. It would also allow setup and installation testing.
A separate environment also allows QA to test installation issues and fulfillment of all software requirements. You usually setup a separate QA environment, because you want to give the testers an isolated environment on which to test, so that developers and testers can work at the same time.

Different environments in Software development...