Usually asked in Interviews
You are a Software testing engineer. A project comes to your company for testing. Describe the whole process after that.
When a project comes to the company for testing firstly it is assigned to a team by Project Manager.A team could be of any number varying from 2 persons to 20 or more. The complexity of project,deadline of project etc. are the factors which a project manager keep in mind while assigning a project to a team.
Now after the project has been assigned, the requirements are being reviewed by the all the team members.Simultaneously the project is analysed and reviewed by the team members.After understanding the project completely,the test cases are designed by the team keeping in mind that the whole functionality of software should be covered in the test cases.After the test cases have been made,the test cases are reviwed properly by senior persons to ensure that whole functionality has been covered in the test cases and then they declare them to be final for testing.Various test management tools are available in the market like Mercury's Test Director and many more.You can use such tools to manage your test cases.
After the finalisation of test cases then comes the turn of Software Testing means the turn to execute these test cases.Now this can be done in two ways : Manually or Automatically
If we go for manual testing then we read each step of test case and perform it on the software and note the bugs.
If we go for automated testing then for that also various automation tools are available in the market like Mercury's Winrunner,Mercury's QTP and many more.These all are not open source but lots of open source tools are also available.
Automated testing is done using record and play.what we do is that we record all the steps of test cases by performing it on the software in the same manner as written in test cases and then next time if you want to run that test case again,you just play back that recorded script and the whole test case would be executed in seconds.
This is how we automate the process of Testing.
Whether we go for manual testing or automated testing,we'll find lots of bugs.When the actual result doesn't match with expected result,we call it as bug . Now we should report the bugs to developers.To report the bugs to developers,again there are lots of tools available in the market like JIRA,Bugzilla etc.These tools are called Bug Tracking Tools and among them some are open source and some are not.These tools are only used to report the bugs to developers.
This is how we test a software.