Software Quality Assurance

To many projects are tested and verified, signed off on by users and rolled to production with nothing but issues, why? and what can IT do about it. There are several methods for moving new products to production, like turning the test bed into Production, (though one needs to know this prior to the build out of the environment, else pitfalls will arise).  So, planning is the easy answer to this but how do you know to plan for scale and sustainability? Trust in your product and IT team. For these are the folks that, 'know' the environment and product lifecycle. 

Quality Assurance, Change Management and Application Support, Or the back half of continuous development. Software products that are tested to meet the business/product owner needs and then moved without disruption, to production and supported for its life cycle ; you end up with a stable, sustainable model to move continuously and quickly on industry changes. When you've built a QA Team and a CM Team with the right people and process the technology becomes an awesome tool to support and make the work easy.

Document all the new IT 'stuff' aka software, patches, middle-ware, hardware, network and security updates and go back and ensure all the previous documentation is updated. Finding the elusive IT software owner...who configures this software for what it does? And then try to pull the teeth that are 'configuration items' to see if they've been documented, (which it is likely that they have not). Do that with minimal resources, (human power) and make it happen yesterday. These are just the starting pain points of managing configuration.

The more eyes the better and when those eyes do nothing but look at bug and issues and requirements all day they are trained in a way that our business testers will never know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSHuma375Ec

Casandra was cursed to know the future by Zeus with one caveat that being no one would believe her; as a leader in QA this will be the position you'll be put in on a daily basis.

Who else uses the vendors you're testing for, provide them your test beds? What to do when you don't have them? How to build a stage or mirror of PROD and why do that?

Resource allocation and how to 'swag' or an estimated Level Of Effort, (LOE). If dev time was 100 hour is 50 hours of QA enough? How would you know if you had no requirements documentation? Who will be testing? QA or The business.