How have industry standards and regulations influenced your testing processes?

I come from an industrial automation domain and once I entered this domain, I learned about certain certifications that our products have to go through and those certifications need our test reports in a specific format.

I have also heard from some testers that they had a business need to compulsorily write test cases to do testing.

Do you have some similar stories to share?

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It was a while ago now but I worked on some software for a short time that had a series of regulations that applied to the industry to qualify for a standard. There was a push towards certain ways to fulfil those needs, but I wasn’t sure what the rules actually were. When I read them I realised that it wasn’t at all specific on how things like traceability should be implemented, nor to what degree, really only that it needed to exist, which was great because we could do testing in a much more adaptable way. Without reading the regulations we would have worked with existing assumptions about them.

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yes.

Certain certifications our products have to go through could be:

  • a formal connectivity test to interface with a financial institution
  • an ISO270001-compliant organisation to be able to deliver to public organisations
  • a WCAG accessibility test to deliver webpages in the EU
  • GDPR are similar regulatory requirements, and more are coming our way

those certifications need our test reports in a specific format
They are usually a construct of an outsourcing contract or similar framework.
Like Chris writes, when big pharma companies setup test report templates in order to comply with FDA requirements, the real regulations are not as strict as we make them. Could apply of the above, that to integrate to a certain service you have to provide the evidence in a given format.

compulsorily write test cases to do testing
In some situations “test cases” are still considered the only proof of testing happening (sigh). Which sounds very narrowminded. On the other hand I’m currently working on a thing with an external audit of a range of formal requirements. For that case, test cases seem to be the best fit for an audit trail - rather than an acceptance criteria discussion on a Jira ticket.

The IT world is bigger than we see from the software testing planet…

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