Approach of Quality Assurance
When embarking upon contracting a testing partner, we at QAC understand that this is something that our clients don't do every day. Furthermore, given the longer term nature of testing applications over multiple revisions and releases, it is very important to have the right "fit" of partner who can understand your business and help you achieve your long term business goals. To help mitigate this risk, we take a Diagnostic approach to ensuring a good long term "fit" for our clients by performing a small service to determine suitability of our clients' portfolio of applications that are targeted for the OSTF.
We call this service aptly, an Application Portfolio Assessment (APA). The purpose of the APA is to:
- Determine the suitability of each application to a remote factory testing approach by determining the resources needed; (ex: Personnel, Facilities, Infrastructure, Tools, etc;)
- Determine if there are any special resources that would be exclusive to this/these applications and no other client. (ex: special VPN or data lines for access to remotely hosted applications.)
- Establish a baseline (including total work effort, duration and loaded cost) as to current cost and effort to test the applications. This will then be used as a benchmark for QAC to surpass. (both in reduced effort/ cost, and reduced time to production/market)
- Review a cross section of the existing Test Assets to ascertain their maturity and suitability for our processes/methodology.
- Where needed, provide remedial work on the test assets to prepare them for factory usage
- Provide a final report and cost proposal, indentifying the cost of all resources per hour of work and a review / recommendation on all applications in the portfolio targeted for factory testing.
Benefits of The Application Portfolio Assessment (APA)
The Benefit of this diagnostic approach is that is provides our clients a high degree of assurance that:
- The applications in the portfolio have been thoroughly reviewed and analyzed for smooth execution;
- The applications are costed in the most reasonable method possible where every opportunity for cost reduction has been considered;
- The ability to measure the benefits of the OSTF are now complete, so as to highlight savings, improvements in quality and improvements in time to production are easily calculated;
- The Test Assets for the applications are now properly prepared / approved for Factory Use;
- Advice has been recieved as to the best way to proceed with the migration plans for the applications to get them to the factory, and a communications and transition plan are being prepared.
- Functional and delivery risk have been identified and mitigated to our client's satisfaction.
- All information for a delivery contract is prepared
Long Term monitoring and Innovation
Once engaged, our approach to successive releases is to over achieve the previous release. We accomplish this by tracking our efforts and analyzing the defects from the previous release.
In short, our goal is to execute less wherever possible, and discover more defects wherever possible. Thus our Defects / Executed TC ratio will increase.
Since this is not the norm for most testing facilities, how do we accomplish this Innovation? Firstly, all of our testers are aware of the time required for the current task in the previous release, thus setting the stage for improvement; Secondly, we employ additional automation scripts with each successive execution, thus replacing manual testing at every opportunity. This results in less human intervention and less work effort for the same number of Test cases.
When we have begun to exhaust opportunities for increased productivity through Automation, be begin a maturity process by incorporating our Business Risk-based testing methodology / Best Practices. This allows us to use our built in Testing Application Suite to analyze the time required at each step and the inherent risk in the application under test against the risk in the type of each test comprising a test case.
This prioritization of testing allows us to begin to emphasize high risk TC execution and de-emphasize low risk Test Cases so that all defects can be found without executing all tests. As a result, Defects increase and Execution decreases resulting in a higher ration of Defects : Executed Tests / work; This yields higher application quality (due to the increases in defects extracted), in less work and less duration (quicker time to production / market);
This is the basis for how we compensate our staff.
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