DHQA - Development Handoff to QA

The Development Handoff to QA (DHQA) is an important event in a software project.

It is the event to indicate that the code is complete and ready for testing.

It means that developers finish the coding and the dev side of testing, including unit testing and certain level of integration testing.

Here are some of the check list items:

• Provide an overview of product functionality.  I feel that DHQA event should not be the first time that QA hear the project. QA should already be participate in the functional specification and technical design review. 
• Demonstrate the basic product functionality that are covered in the dev testing scenario.  It should be done from the user's perspectives.  It is expected that the basic flow should work.  QA can help testing the different scenarios and different configurations.  
• Describe what tests have been done by development and what the testing results are
• Work through the installation and configuration steps
• Provide the necessary documentations.  This may be in a draft form but should be as close to the doc that will be provided to the users as possible.  The documentation is actually part of the testing too.
• List the known issues and the plan to solve the issues
• List the pending work items if any, and communicate the ETA when the issues will be fixed
• Provide the contact information and set up the communication plan between dev and QA.  For example, how to report the bugs, what are the expected information from the bug report, etc.
• Let QA ask the questions and document the FAQ
• Require QA to sign off the DHQA event.  If the code is not ready for QA, Another DHQA can be scheduled

DHQA should be a formal event as part of the project lifecycle, when a waterfall model is followed.

This event itself is a milestone in the project.