There are many types of requirements. The major one is business requirements, which come from BA, basically focus on function.But as QA, should not only focus on function requirement, also need to care about non-function requirement, like reliable,maintenance requirement,testability and so on.
How to better understand those requirement ?
First, can make BA walkthrough requirement.BA need to clearly user's background,what did want this functions for. Every party joined walk through should ask questions and BA clarify the concerns. After that , requirement baseline should implement.
Second, although 98% requirement are come from BA's function requirement,there are still some come from design .To dig out this part of requirement, QA need to join SA 's design share.To to that, QA must have technical skills.
After requirement analysis,QA need to do
testing design. what types of testing should be apply ? Function testing is always's the basic one, performance testing,security testing,install/uninstall,compatibility,help guideline testing and others.
Blackbox testing is first testing method to think in project, it can find 80% defects of software, but it also have some blind spot can't be reached.so need to use some white box testing to do supplement.White box testing can find some bugs that black box hard to do, it usually need to implement by unit testing, a very resource task. so grey box testing is the better choice.
Grey box testing method need QA to know code implement logic, and testing though black box function testing method.QA can supplement some test cases based on code analysis(white box), and assist some logs to check if function implement(black box)correctly.It's the key value of Grey box testing.
Besides above testing method , QA also need to think about other specific, like memory leak,system resource occupy and so on. To verify above, can do assist from some tools, like boundchecker/purify to monitor memory when software running. Another way is to write some tools to verify. So, QA need to know write code, yes, indeed need.
