QA Life Cycle (QALC)

I am sure you heard of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Quality Assurance Life Cycles (QALC) is another variate term which is not so common in use but it is important concept for SQA specialists. To put it simply, SDLC emphasizes on how the software developed, evolved and flowed from requirements to the end products. QALC focuses on the QA activities that integrated and flowed within the SDLC. Therefore, QALC is highly depending on the SDLC models in your environments. For example, the QALC of agile model is definitely not the same as in waterfall model.

Typical question we are interested is: Where does testing start? How should we end testing effort for each release?

There is no straight-forward answer.

Source: Engineering Notebook

In Waterfall model, each phase starts only the earlier phase has exited. The SDLC of a waterfall model consists of:

Analysis phase

Requirements phase

Design phase

Implementation phase

Testing phase

Maintenance phase

As you can see, the testing effort starts after the implementation phase exits. It can't start earlier than that. Therefore, the design bug which captured in the testing phase is always very costly. Having said that, this doesn't mean that waterfall model is definitely a bad model. It is still very applicable in mature products environment which requirements are predictable and requirements changes during development are minimal or close to none.

Next, I will drill into the QALC in waterfall model.