Development/QA/Production Environment

I am the QA Test Lead for a large enterprise software company with a team of over 30 developers and a small team of QA Testers. We currently use SVN to do all our code and schema check in which is then built out each night after hours.

My dilemma is this: All of developments code is promoted from their machine to the central repository on a daily basis into a single branch. This branch is our production code for our next software release. Each day when code is checked in, the stable branch is de-stabilized with this new piece of code until QA can get to testing it. It can sometimes take weeks for QA to get to a specific piece of code to test. The worst part of all of this is that we identify months ahead of time of what code is going to go into the standard release and what code will be bumped to the next branch, which has us coding all the way up until almost the actual release date.

I'm really starting to see the effects of this process (开发者_C百科put in place by my predecessors) and I'm trying to come up with a way that won't piss off development whereby they can promote code to a QA environment, without holding up another developers piece of code. A lot of our code has shared libraries, and as I mentioned before it can sometimes take QA awhile to get to a piece of code to test. I don't want to hold up development in a certain area while that piece of code is waiting to be tested.

My question now is, what is the best methodology to adopt here? Is there software out there than can help with this? All I really want to do is ensure QA has enough time to test a release without any new code going in until it's tested. I don't want to end up on the street looking for a new job because "QA is doing a crappy job" according to a lot of people in the organization.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated and will help with our testing and product.

It's a broad question which takes a broad answer, and I'm not sure if I know all it takes (I've been working as dev lead and architect, not as test manager). I see several problems in the process you describe, each require a solution:

1. Test team working on intermediate versions
   This should be handled by working with the dev guys on splitting their work effort into meaningful iterations (called sprints in agile methodology) and delivering a working version every few weeks. Moreover, it should be established that feature are implemented by priority. This has the benefit that it keep the "test gap" fixed: you always test the latest version, which is a few weeks old, and devs understand that any problem you find there is more important than new features for next version.

2. Test team working on non stable versions
   There is absolutely no reason why test team should invest time in version which are "dead on arrival". Continuous Integration is a methodology by which "breaking the code" is found as soon as possible. This require some investment in products like Hudson or home-grown solution to make sure build failure are notices as they occur and some "Smoke Testing" is applied to them.

3. Your test cycle is long
   Invest in automated testing. This is not to say your testers need to learn to program; rather you should invest in recruiting or growing people with their knowledge and passion in writing stable automated tests.

4. You choose "coding all the way up until almost the actual release date"
   That's right; it's a choice made by you and your management, favoring more features over stability and quality. It's a fine choice in some companies with a need to get to market ASAP or have a key customer satisfied; but it's a poor long-term investment. Once you convince your management it's a choice, you can stop taking it when it's not really needed.

Again, it's my two cents.

You need a continuous integration server that is able to automate the build and testing and deployment. I would look at a combination of Apache Hudson, JUnit (DBUnit), Selenium and code quality tools like Sonar.

To ensure that the code that the QA is testing is unique and not constantly changing, you should make the use of TAGs. A tag is like a branch except that the contents are immutable. Once a set of files have been checked in / committed you cannot change and then commit on top of those files. This way the QA has a stable version of code they are working with.

Using SVN without branching seems like a wasted resource. They should set up a stable branch and a test branch (ie. the daily build). When code is tested in the daily build it can be then pushed up to the development release branch.

Like Albert mentioned depending on what your code is you might also look into some automated tests for some of the shared libraries (which depending on where you are in development really shouldn't be changing all that much or your Dev team is doing a crappy job of organization imho).

You might also talk with your dev team leaders (or who ever manages them) and discuss where they view QA and what QA can do to help them the best. Ask: Does your dev team have a set cut off time before releases? Do you test every single line of code? Are there places that you might be spending too much detailed time testing? It shouldn't all fall on QA, QA and dev need to work together to get the product out.