NVP Software Solutions

Author: Neil

  • Do your after release activities feel like a dirge?

    Do your after release activities feel like a dirge?

    Shipping software should feel like a win.

    Instead, for too many engineering teams, the post-release routine resembles a funeral march:

    • Weeks of post-release fixes and firefighting
    • Engineers kept on high alert waiting for the next alert to sound
    • An exhausting loop of incident reviews, PIRs, and post-mortems after every single event
    • The lingering dread that you might have to pull the release back entirely

    You don’t want a post-mortem after every deployment. Nobody does.

    When release aftermath feels like a slow, painful grind, the problem isn’t your developers’ dedication. It’s a delivery process that treats deployment as an all-or-nothing gamble instead of a routine, low-risk habit.

    High-performing teams make deployments boring:

    • They decouple deployments from feature releases with feature flags.
    • They limit blast radius with canary traffic before rolling out to 100%.
    • They rely on automated rollbacks instead of late-night heroics.

    If your post-release checklist feels like an endless mourning ritual, it’s time to rethink how you ship.

    What does the first 48 hours after a release look like on your team: business as usual, or high-alert triage?

    #EngineeringLeadership #DevOps #SoftwareDelivery #ContinuousDelivery #TechLeadership

    Strategic Quality Implementation

    #QA,#QualityAssurrance,#SoftwareTesting,#SoftwareTestingStrategy,#TASSQ,#NVP

    @Neil Price-Jones,@jeremy Berriault

    https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7399187902221443072

    www.nvp.ca; www.berriaultandassociates.com

  • Agile to Waterfall?

    Agile to Waterfall?

    Wait! That is not the direction in which we are supposed to be moving. Everyone is moving in the opposite direction (or at least is supposed to be). Agile is supposed to be more effective that Waterfall at reacting to changing circumstances and delivering faster. 

    However, we are referring here to an Agile development shop with a Waterfall customer. So even though we were following the Scrum Methodology and trying to be flexible, our final client was quite traditional and very risk averse. 

    Our solution was to provide the Quality Assurance documentation and results in the format required by the client while mapping it to the Agile processes used by the vendor.

    Review your processes frequently.

    #QA,#QualityAssurrance,#SoftwareTesting,#SoftwareTestingStrategy,#TASSQ,#NVP

    @Neil Price-Jones

    https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7399187902221443072

    www.nvp.ca

    Software Testing solves the problems of yesterday and today.

    Quality Assurance solves the problems of the future.

  • A (QA) Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

    A (QA) Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

    • Do you have no-one who wants to start the Quality Assurance journey?
    • Is it tough to take that first step?
    • Can you sustain yourself after that first step?

    Many Quality Assurance initiatives are launched with a lot of publicity and lofty aims and then quietly disappear. There are a couple of major reasons for this.

    The wrong people are entrusted with the program. Either they lack the interest in doing it or they lack the authority to do it. Thus the program goes nowhere.

    The second major reason is that people are scared to take the first step. They make great plans and create some documents and then founder on taking the first step.

    A Quality Assurance Initiative is a journey and that first step is the most important and the most difficult.

    #QA,#QualityAssurrance,#SoftwareTesting,#SoftwareTestingStrategy,#TASSQ,#NVP

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  • QA Initiative

    QA Initiative

    Quality Assurance for software has traditionally been siloed either within a company or even within a project.  There are quality assurance people who are frequently seconded to a project with a mandate to get the project out the door on time and preferably under budget. Those people are interested in quality assurance but are frequently classified as software testing for that project and nothing more. Some organizations will build a centralized quality assurance department and task it with promulgating quality assurance and give them a quality assurance mandate. Frequently that degenerates into a test tool selection and repository group who identifies tools that can potentially service multiple projects and tries to rationalize the purchase process and do some do some due diligence on what is purchased.  However quality assurance that transcends the entire company or even outside the company is very rare. This is something we need to address because there’s currently not a lot of centralized groups that are propounding the value and benefit of quality assurance to multiple organizations.

    We will be holding a kickoff webinar.

    Date: October 20, 2026

    Time:  12:00 – 1:00 pm (Toronto time)

    Location:  Online (Zoom)

    Registration Link:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6718069876?pwd=qkWI2it1m3mBa5qYIH2OPHJiaIhR1F.1&omn=86229445221

    Register for this Free Webinar.

    For previous talks from NVP and Associates see: https://www.youtube.com/@neilprice-jones1170

    #QA,#QualityAssurrance,#SoftwareTesting,#SoftwareTestingStrategy,#TASSQ,#NVP

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  • Quality Assurance – Step 7

    Quality Assurance – Step 7

    You have done everything that you can think of internally and you have spoken to outside people and used their input to further improve. At this time, it may be necessary to put the initiative on the back burner and wait for issues to pop up. We generally would not suggest this since it is hard enough to get a Quality Initiative going once, let alone, restarting it a second time but if you cannot think of anything further to do, it may be worse to keep pushing on something rather than stop and wait for something obvious to appear.

    Do not anticipate that because the initiative has been approved once that it is immune from further questions until it is completed.

    #QA,#QualityAssurrance,#SoftwareTesting,#SoftwareTestingStrategy,#TASSQ,#NVP

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  • Quality Assurance – Step 3

    Quality Assurance – Step 3

    In our last post, we talked about how you would encounter resistance from some groups. If you have successfully navigated the issues, then the next problem that may set in is a loss of direction. The initial items to be improved are usually obvious and have been issues for years. However, after that it will take more effort to find things to improve either because they not be obvious or they may have been considered in the past and discarded as unobtainable. It is necessary to go back and revisit old items since the situation may have changed.

    One of the key considerations of Quality Assurance is to see how activities interrelate and whether a change in one can have beneficial impacts on many others.

    Do not anticipate that because the initiative has been approved once that it is immune from further questions until it is completed.

    .

    #QA,#QualityAssurrance,#SoftwareTesting,#SoftwareTestingStrategy,#TASSQ,#NVP

    @Neil Price-Jones

    https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7399187902221443072/ https://www.nvp.ca

  • Quality Assurance

    Quality Assurance

    During the past year, we gathered up some articles and LinkedIn posts indicating a desire to improve Quality Assurance. Most people seemed to feel that this needed to be a country lead initiative or at least a consortium of several large companies along with educational institutions. While that might be a laudable aim, it is unlikely to occur.


    Most governments have other things to do and a lack of understanding about quality. Large companies have other priorities and Quality Assurance is just one of many items that need to be addressed.

    This initiative will need to be lead by individuals who have a vested interest in Quality Assurance and a willingness to involve other parties in IT (almost everyone) who would benefit.

    We will be launching this in October.

    #QA,#QualityAssurrance,#SoftwareTesting,#SoftwareTestingStrategy,#TASSQ,#NVP

    @Neil Price-Jones

    https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7399187902221443072

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  • Quality Assurance – Testing

    Quality Assurance – Testing

    We are continuing our series on quality assurance. We have deliberately left out the coding piece of this because that is the piece that is changing the most frequently and processes that we had in the past have been superseded considerably by the advent of AI and the ability to grab code from certain repositories.

    We’re still looking at the testing, however, from the point of view of process improvement, because not only is testing lagging somewhat behind in terms of. AI implementation but the insecurity around code developed by AI is leading to an increased emphasis on testing.

    So the processes revolving around testing are even more crucial than they were before. Ensuring that we are:

    1. testing what we should be
    2. not over testing
    3. having the confidence at the end to state that the release can go forward.

    This is definitely critical when you consider our two other posts which came out last month and two more this month about having confidence in your release delivery and ensuring that it can go ahead.

    #QA,#QualityAssurrance,#SoftwareTesting,#SoftwareTestingStrategy,#TASSQ,#NVP

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