Quality Assurance

1. General

QA is now maintained by the Software Infrastructure Team
The former ATLAS offline software QA Coordinators were: Peter Sherwood and Solveig Albrand.
Quality Assurance or Quality Control? Whats in a name?
Can QA procedures be applied to physicists? What are we trying to achieve and how can we do it in the context of a large physics experiment?
History of ATLAS software quality.

See the QA WIKI page for the latest news.

See the Testing Wiki page for the latest news.

This table describes different types of tests
Unit Testing	Also known as component testing and class testing. A class is tested "in vitro". In the "bottom-up" testing model, unit testing is the lowest level. All the functions should be tested for all possible input values (i.e. using data especially generated for the tests).
Integration Testing	Integration is carried out when all the sub systems have been individually tested. these tests should be designed to find errors which result from unforseen interactions between components. The tests should be designed to demonstrate that all the functions specified in the requirements have been implemented.
Regression Testing	Regression testing must be carried out when a modification has been made to a previously working system. It is not sufficient to retest the component which has been modified. Regression testing makes sure that the results obtained by a system are the same as those at some previous time, or if they are not the same, then the reason is understood.

See the most recent version of the C++ ATLAS coding rules, version 1.2.1 (2003-07-11) [pdf, 66 pages]. These rules were originally written by a team of core ATLAS developers. Revisions are made periodically by the QA coordinators, when experience shows that they are necessary.
Standards for the use of units in ATLAS code (also available as [pdf]).

What is a review? The Philosophy (and Psychology) of Software Reviews

We no longer provide support for any tools, but here are some notes on tools which tools users may find helpful for code management and testing.