Last week we gave a partial list of intangibles: Better Quality; Strategic decisions; Opportunity and Innovation; Flexibility and Information and Decisions. We recommended setting a base level cost so they had some value. It should not start out too high but as you gain information over the projects, it should be possible to refine the benefit and get a more accurate benefit figure.
Category: Software Testing
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Are your Product Issues Worrying You?
Possibly your customers will not like the User eXperience.
They may use your product in unexpected ways and break it.
OR
They may love it and ask for further functionality.
Any one of the above scenarios can cause problems for a product. Some may arise within hours of release and others may appear over time. Regardless,you need to be prepared.
- Align your Product Assurance with your clients.
- Incorporate Product Assurance and Testing to catch issues early while they are cheap to fix
- Lay the groundwork for future success.
NVP Software Solutions
- NVP Software Solutions provides industry-leading software product assurance and testing services, customized to address client’s business requirements.
Schedule a no-charge one hour consultation with a senior Product Assurance consultant for an initial assessment/problem solving session.
Contact us: Nvp.ca
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TASSQ March 2025 Talk
Toronto Association of System and Software Quality -TASSQ is pleased to announce our Webinar for March 2025.
Topic: Back to Basics
Presenter: Huib Schoots
Location: Online/Zoom
When: Tuesday March 25 at 6:15 p.m. until 7:30 p.m. EST
Cost: $14.00 CAD
Register at: TASSQ
Presentation Abstract:
Organizations are often concerned that testing is not sufficiently focused on finding the problems that really matter. Testers often don’t know how to determine when they’ve tested enough. Testers are naturally inclined to test too much. So we test too much and probably regularly test the wrong things… The solution is simple: back to basics!
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Are your Quality Assurance Issues Worrying You?
Schedule a no-charge one hour consultation with a senior Quality Assurance consultant for an initial assessment/problem solving session.
- Align your Quality Assurance Practices with your client’s needs before they ask.
- Incorporate Quality Assurance and Testing to catch issues early while they are cheap to fix
- Lay the groundwork for future success.
NVP Software Solutions
- NVP Software Solutions provides industry-leading software quality assurance and testing services, customized to address client’s business requirements.
Contact us: Nvp.ca
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Get a Consistent Reporting Format
Reporting results is one of the bigger aspects of testing that is often overlooked in the beginning of a project. The initial efforts are aimed at getting the testing environment established and the test cases written and approved. Then the launch into testing occupies a lot of time ironing out the minor irritants to test execution. At that point the request for reports comes up and the test lead is frequently left scrambling for data to report what is requested. Failure to anticipate the reporting requirements can lead to a lot of manual work.
Lessons Learned: A few hours defining results reporting formats can save hours later in the project.
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Too Many Disparate Pieces of Software (What Happens When One Fails or Goes Out of Business)
An assessment of an existing and successful system showed a lot of disparate pieces of software hooked together in various ways. An inability to properly define and build effective QA environments for testing meant that some testing was not done and taken on faith that it worked or was tested in production (and fixed). No API testing was completed so any failure of any piece of the solution had immediate repercussions throughout the product and had to be fixed on the fly.
Lessons Learned: A proper environment and knowledge and testing of the APIs would have solved a lot of the issues that showed in production.
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Working Towards the Final Result
Finding out requirements by digging through the hierarchy endlessly or how not to implement a product. A recent upgrade included a migration from one database (home grown) to a commercially available product. It is well known that migrations are always dangerous and can be quite time consuming. The issue was that an attempt was made to replicate the existing (and mainly unknown) database into the new one rather than asking what was important to know after the migration was complete. The testing turned into a series of cycles while the testers dug deeper and deeper into the existing database.
Lessons Learned: Make sure to take a 360 degree view of the expectations before going down the testing path.
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The Importance of User Scenarios
A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned one instance of where Edge Cases relating to monitoring of queues caused a two month slippage in the project schedule. A similar issue came up with mobile phones that the client was accustomed to use when not at the desk. The product was designed with the expectation that users would be seated at desks and controlling the product via the workstation interface. When this was not the case, a substantial set of issues came up revolving around getting the calls to the mobile phones, making sure the queues were acted on properly and reacting to new messages. A further delay was encountered working through these unanticipated changes. There was also a problem with call recording for calls starting on the mobile phones.
Lessons Learned: A scenario showing the Day-in-the-life of a user would have identified a lot of these issues.