Category: Quality Assurance Consulting

How many times have you heard that statement as you start a meeting

One of your critical technical people (in this case; the technical person) is unavailable because they are busy fire-fighting in another project.  The disruption caused by fire-fighting is huge and it has on-going effects.  Meetings are delayed and the project is delayed as a result.  People have to reschedule their time and days. Any preparation time may be wasted.  A period of of 30 or 60 minutes unexpectedly becomes free with no plan for using it. This is especially true if the notification comes through at the last minute. The nature of fire-fighting an issue is that it cannot usually be estimated. It may be solved in 10 minutes or it may take days. The solution is quite frequently obvious once it is found but getting there is painful. So it is hard to estimate whether someone will be available. The issue could be resolved right ahead of the meeting or not (which was the case here).

Quality Assurance tries to avoid fire-fighting by planning for the possibility and making sure people are available.

In the above situation, the meeting has been rescheduled for today – we’ll see if it comes off.

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What does an Organization “Buying Quality” really want?

A couple of weeks ago we listed all the items we were doing that constituted Quality Initiatives.  The comment was that they were all over the place in terms of what was required to implement Quality at any particular organization.  So each organization is ‘buying’ something different.

Subsequently we had a conversation with someone who promotes Project Management conferences and he suggested that there would be a substantial training component to get people in his industry to  understand Quality.  He made this comment based on our discussions without even seeing the list of items we were working on at the time.

Stay tuned for the next few blogs (in between the ones advertising TASSQ and KWSQA Meetings) to see some explanations of Quality Assurance for a variety of organizations.

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What does an Organisation “Buying Quality” really want?

As mentioned in our newsletter, we have several initiatives under way to enhance the Quality Assurance in a number of organisations. If you reviewed the list, you will note that they are all over the place in terms of what they expect.

1. One is doing traditional Process Improvement.
2. Another wants to improve their Quality Management, enhance their Processes (QA) and still complete testing (QC) on all their projects. As you can well imagine, this one has several competing stakeholders.
3. A third one wants to improve their Requirements Management, testing is not considered.
4. One wants to record the results of their tests but is quite satisfied with their processes as they currently exist.
5. The last one wants complementary QA training to support their processes (which are currently changing!)

Suffice to say that these are all under a Quality Initiative.

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It is interesting how test tools seem to move through cycles.  We mentioned in a previous post how many test tools were listing AI as their differentiator.  This year we seem to have encountered two different items:

Codeless – several test tools that have come to our attention recently are claiming to be codeless.  Either they are driven by capture of the transactions and generate a script from that capture or they use keywords to create a script.  Either way they seem to have removed the need to work at the scripting level.

Driven by a design – in a somewhat similar fashion they use a design or a diagram to drive the scripts and conceal the actual scripting again.

We have asked a few questions about these tools (the same ones that no doubt occurred to you)

1. How can they be modified (especially when dealing with changing requirements in a fluid project)?
2. How can they be maintained across several releases so that the investment is repaid (positive ROI)?
3. How can they be controlled (for those clients who need an auditable trail)?  Some of our clients would not be happy with just the actual scripts landing in a controlled repository. They would also want the script design keywords or diagram to be controlled as well.  This way they have the whole story.

We have received varying answers to these questions.  Some seem prepared, others do not.

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Another Quality Initiatives is also getting going and we want to discuss this one this week.

This one revolves around dealing with endlessly changing client requirements.  You always want to fulfill the client requirements but you also need to make sure that you are not losing money if they change their mind too often.  The old solution was based on trust and worked 90% of the time with no issues.  If the client had changes, they communicated them and agreed to any changes in price as a result.  The problems started when the changes impacted other requirements and no one had taken the time to thoroughly analyze the impact.  If it was identified early enough there was time to correct the problem.  However, if there were far reaching changes and impacts, the cost got quite high.  An organised system with dependencies and impacts measured was proposed.  In addition an audit trail was included so that any changes were tracked and could be reversed if necessary.  Quality processes were applied.  We are still working through the implementation.

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It has been an interesting start to the year. After a couple of weeks while people caught up on their email and considered how the year was starting, this week saw a rush of items starting up. There are too almost too many seminars to attend. The Quality Initiatives are also getting going and we want to discuss one of them.

We assessed an organization for its maturity level. Some parts were good and some needed work which is about what was expected. Covid-19 delayed some of the progress in addressing the issues simply because we could not get together to discuss the resolution to the issues. It is not bad to do it remotely but it is not as good; too many gaps.

However, the interesting part is that we have now reached the point where other groups (beyond QA) will be impacted. This means a whole sales and deployment process and pushing back against the resistance from people who see no benefit to them. Suffice to say, this will be interesting in the absence of personal contact and the ability to address the issues immediately.

If you have input, please contact us.

Test Leader or Manager with problems? Consider the Test Managers Conference.

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At this time of year we, like a lot of other people, look back at the past year and try to predict what might come in the next year. Obviously last year’s predictions were derailed by Covid-19.

Manual Testing

Manual testing continued in a lot of organisations with the emphasis on new or updated applications. Not as much was said about it, at least not that we saw, but there were still many people working in manual testing.

Automated Testing

There seems to be so many test tools right now, it is hard to keep track. Not sure if this was a personal experience with us paying more attention or whether there are simply a lot right now. There seems to be a test tool for everything and almost too many to choose from for any particular need.

Quality Assurance

There were some encouraging signs around Quality Assurance and Quality Management. One thing the Pandemic did, was give some time for consideration of the longer term and that always benefits Quality Assurance. Also, with Work from Home quite prevalent, there were less chances to correct any items that might go wrong. Getting it right the first time was critical.

If you have input on the above, you might want to consider our survey.

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Last week we talked about QA in a pandemic and how approaches were differing between clients. This week we are looking at those who are continuing and what they are doing or did to make it happen successfully.

The major difference between the ones who are continuing and those that are not is an embrace of People, Process, and Technology. Organizations that had a good knowledge of their people and what they could do, did not have any problems with them working offsite. If the organization had mature processes in place as well, then there was very little gap. The processes might have needed some modification to accommodate the remote nature of the work but the rest of it was already in place and ready to go. It was always known that tools facilitate communication and work flows and with the right people and processes this was easily maintained. How much this helped, became very obvious when some organizations continued on with almost no break while others had a hard stop then got going again slowly. Those with poor trust or lacking process or tools stumbled badly.

It did not eliminate some problems, there was some expectation of onsite presence in the office (testing on devices that only worked on the internal network) or access to the server but it could have been much worse.

Two last comments that were made in a Business Magazine last week:

1. Young people who are new to the company and have no experience are not getting any exposure to the corporate culture. This is an issue.
2. There is a lack of ‘water-cooler’ discussions that help facilitate idea exchanges and new ideas. This is also an issue.

If you have input on the above, you might want to consider our survey.

Image by Vladimir Fedotov on Unsplash.