Track Defects
I mentioned earlier the importance of good project management, and now we are going to return to this concept. Depending on the size and structure of your project, the responsibility for keeping a record of the defects will either rest with a dedicated test lead or with the project lead (who is therefore also the test lead). Developers will find bugs in their own code, and in many cases will fix them there and then. However, some bugs will be too elusive to track down quickly, or there might not be time to fix them, so they should be raised with the test lead. Faults will also be raised by the users during their own testing, and also by anybody else involved in the test program. Unfortunately, it is quite possible that faults may continue to be found after the application has been released.
A suitable defect-tracking system will allow for the severity of defects to be graded to different levels (from show-stopper to irrelevant), and for each defect to be allocated to a specific member of the development team. Ideally it should also tie in with the local e-mail system. It is important to maintain an efficient means of tracking all defects so that the overall health of the project can be continually monitored. Toward the end of a development of any size there is normally considerable pressure from the business for it to be released. Before this can happen, however, the project lead and the user lead will need to continually review the defect status list until a point is reached when the user lead is satisfied with the correctness of the system. This can only be properly achieved by maintaining a thorough, central log of the current health of the system.