Hello, everyone. Welcome to KnowledgeCity's course: software QA concepts and processes. I'm Andy and I'll be your instructor. In this module, we're gonna be looking at different types of planning guides for a system development lifecycle as well as different testing strategies to handle the system development lifecycle. In this lesson, we'll be looking at planning guides and different versions of planning guides and different resources that are available to you. So what is a planning guide? A planning guide, when you're going to create software for a company, for a group is basically a map. It lays out how every part of it is gonna work. Who's involved, what kind of testing will happen. What you'll do if things go right. What you'll do if things go wrong. All different parts so that if someone from the outside came and looked at any part of that planning guide, they would understand how the software's being implemented and designed. So once again, the advantage the major advantage is that anybody can see what you're working on and where it's gonna go and what the next steps would be. You could get templates for this from the government. They're out there and they're free to use, and they're a great help. I always use one of the templates to get me going on my planning guides. I have three samples included and we're gonna look at them in a moment. But first, the commonalities. No matter how you design your plan, there's some basic parts to it. You have your introduction. The introduction tells somebody what this is all about. What's the program? Why is it here? Where can I find information that led to the development of this program? Things of that nature. Features that you are gonna test, features you're not gonna test. How to test. And different things about the organization, the environment that will have an effect on your software. So let's look at some of these planning guides. The first one I wanna show you, I've been using it for a long time now. This was, once again, this was freely available from the government. First of all, it's from 1990. And if you look at that computer, I think that's an old Apple. Looking at the keyboard. But what I wanted to show you, Allied-Signal Aerospace Company. If we look, all the way back in 1990, if we look at some of the categories here in the table of contents, you have your introduction, the definitions of what all the parts of this software quality assurance are about. The life cycle, the project. Different roles of people involved. How management is gonna get involved. The different plans. So you'll see that this one follows the other ones that I'm about to show you pretty closely but it has its own flavors and different things that it does. So let's look at the other ones now. This is a government planning guide you can download directly from the Library of Congress. And what's nice is they have all these blue areas where they're telling you what you should put in here. They also have these areas in brackets and greater than and less than symbols that tell you what you should type there. It's very helpful. So in essence, you don't have to recreate the wheel. So if we scroll through, they give you a document version control, a review. This is a common feature also. You'll see it in a second in another one that I'm gonna show you. But look at the table of contents. Once again, an introduction. This one's broken out a little further into what makes up the introduction. The different test items are in here. Features not to be tested, features to be tested. How you're gonna do that. Some of these might look familiar to you if you've seen some of the other modules and lessons we've done. It talks about the different type of testing. For example, integration testing. That's where you put together your modules and see how two modules work together and then see how two units work together until eventually, you have a complete system tested. Security testing, this is what would be considered non-functional testing. From a previous lesson, functional testing is how the actual program works. Non-functional testing are all the other components, such as security, network load. Different criteria, what the testing process should give you. And then the environmental factors. What kind of hardware is this gonna be run on? What kind of software? Things of that nature. But as I said, this is a great document from the government that you can simply fill in and a lot of this has been developed from IEEE. We're gonna talk about IEEE in the next lesson. Now, there's another one from the government that was even better, not because of the content but because of this. Look up here. You see it says document 1? This is a pure template. When you open it up, it's as if you're starting a blank document. It's a template, it's not... The other thing I showed you was an actual document. You would have to resave the name. This one's a template. Look, it has revision history, just like the last one. And you can fill it in. Once again, it's got those blue areas that tell you what to do but when you go to save it, it's gonna prompt you for a new name. So that's a template that you can use in Word. You'll notice that this one has actually a little less detail than the previous one. You can add more or less detail. It's up to you but the goal, the main goal of these planning guides is that somebody could look at any portion of it and it could look like a standalone document. They could look at the scope and they could completely understand the scope of this project. They don't need to look at other parts of this to understand the scope. So this is an overview of what a planning guide looks like and how you should use it. Once again, these'll be included. You can use these. They are free to use from the government. They encourage you to use them. So thanks for coming and I'll see you in the next lesson.
