Quality Management – A How To
Three weeks ago we asked Quality Management – Why Bother? This week we want to look at How Quality Management is tackled. (more…)
Tag: Process Improvement
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QA Management – Why Bother?
QA Management – Why Bother?
Two weeks ago we asked if QA Management was a oxymoron. Today we are going to partially answer that question with a NO!
In the smallest set of terms; QA Management is there to save a company or organization money and to make a project run more smoothly. (more…)
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QA Management – An Oxymoron
An oxymoron is two contradictory terms that have been used in conjunction so is “QA Management” an oxymoron or is it simply contradictory? Is it possible to manage Quality Assurance for Quality Assurance or are we wasting our time trying to manage quality? (more…)
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Quality Assurance Process Improvement – Part 4
Quality Assurance Process Improvement is the current topic for our NVP Blog. We completed a series of 4 blogs on Assessments because at the end of the Assessment process a lot of organizations won’t act on the Assessment results if they don’t have a plan for moving forward. This is particularly true if the Assessment has not been tailored to the particular company in question. A standard Assessment process generates standard recommendations which may not be applicable. Make sure you detail your expectations at the beginning of the Assessment so you get value from the process and your expenditure of time.
Last blog focused on How to do Process Improvement and now we’ll address “Dealing with the results”. Many people complete a process improvement assessment; discover a number of problems that need to be fixed but then drop the process without full solving the issues or taking advantage of all of the work that went into getting the results. This typically happens because of the following:
- The work that needs to be done isn’t scalable or fun.
- There’s no one to do the work.
- There’s no budget for the implementation.
- What was discovered is so unexpected that no one knows how to tackle it.
These can all be addressed by the ‘divide and conquer’ methodology.
Once the results of the assessment are known, they need to be organized into logical buckets. Each bucket is then assigned a set of tasks. Some people will tell you that we need to identify the synergies so that everything gets accomplished efficiently with minimal disruption. While that would be the optimal way of doing things; it is rare for anyone to be able to identify all the synergies simply by looking at the list of results of an assessment. We have to accept some redundancy and the fact that some items are going to have to be reversed when new ones are put in place.
Now is the time to implement your results.
Next Week: Scope of Testing
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Quality Assurance Process Improvement – Part 3
Quality Assurance Process Improvement is the current topic in our Blog Series. We completed a series of 4 blogs on Assessments because at the end of the Assessment process a lot of organizations won’t act on the Assessment results if they don’t have a plan for moving forward. This is particularly true if the Assessment has not been tailored to the particular company in question. A standardized Assessment process generates standard recommendations which may not be applicable. Make sure you detail your expectations at the beginning of the Assessment so you get value from the process and your expenditure of time.
Last time we looked at Why Carry Out Process Improvement and now want to address the question of “How to do it”. First we need to identify the processes that we want to improve. We will assume that this step has been completed already. Then we need to measure the existing process for what we want to improve. If we want it to be faster then we need to measure the time it takes. If we want it to be more consistent, then we need the measure the output against some standard. Once we have a baseline of measurements (you will probably be measuring more than one item since we do not want to improve one at the expense of another), then we can decide how we want to improve it. If we want the process to be faster, we might try to get the inputs to it at the right time or before they are needed. We might try cutting out any extra steps. While doing this we do not want to reduce the quality of the output so we will want to measure that as well. if you want it to be more consistent you might look for places where the product deviates from standard and try to improve those while making sure that does not make any other pieces of the product worse.
The post improvement measurements should always be carried out after the process has had a chance to settle down and achieve some stability. Measuring too soon may lead to erroneous conclusions.
The objective is to save the overall organization funds; not just the current project. As such the results of an Assessment and the activities done as part of Process Improvement must be assessed at the corporate level and not at the project level.
Next Week: Guest Blog
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Scheduling Test Cycles
Scheduling Test Cycles often seems to create challenges for Managers, so we thought we’d tackle this for today’s blog. In our experience, there seems to be an ingrained view from Test Managers and Development Managers to not leave time between the Test Cycles or the Fix Cycles for the other party to do their work.
I have seen Test Cycles scheduled consecutively with no room to actually fix anything. The idea was that they could fix the bug overnight or during the weekend because nothing could impede the test effort at this stage. The alternate problem is scheduling by the Development Manager who puts all the time into the Fix or upgrade time and allocates nothing for testing. The same question elicits a similar answer that testing can proceed overnight or on weekends.
What is obvious is that there has to be compromise on both sides.
However, it is possible to schedule overlap. Certainly Developers can start fixing bugs found early in the test cycle. before the cycle is finished, and it’s probably better that they do. However, this requires strong promotion and code control procedures and a plan on how the environments are going to organize. Otherwise, fixes start getting into the test environment before other testing is done. Similarly testing can continue even when Developers are in fix-mode. Planning is required to cover items they aren’t working on at the moment.
We just need to plan our way through this with the understanding that there will be changes as the project evolves, dependencies arise, and items change.
Discussion Questions
- Have you Scheduled Test Cycles?
- If yes, to number 1, how did it work out?
- What would you have done differently based on what you know now?
Next Week: Final meetings for the year
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Quality Assurance Process Improvement – Part 2
Quality Assurance Process Improvement is the current topic in our Blog Series. We completed a series of 4 on Assessments because at the end of the Assessment process a lot of organizations won’t act on the Assessment results if they don’t have a plan for moving forward. This is particularly true if the Assessment has not been tailored to the particular company in question. A standardized Assessment process generates standard recommendations which may not be applicable. Make sure you detail your expectations at the beginning of the Assessment so you get value from the process and your expenditure of time.
Last time we looked at What Process Improvement is and now want to address the question of “Why do it”. We stated earlier that we needed to understand the intent of an Assessment and use it going forward. And that is after-the-fact in terms of the answering the question. Why do an Assessment and continue on with Process Improvement in a Quality Assurance environment in the first place?
The answer is that Process Improvement Saves Time and Money. We do not carry out any Process Improvement activity without the intent of saving money. The activities we do must have a positive ROI. This, however, is the more difficult question to answer since the positive ROI is not always in the current project. Putting in a defect management process; improving the review process; ensuring early involvement of Quality Assurance personnel in a project benefit the next project but not the current one.
The objective is to save the overall organisation funds; not just the current project. As such the results of an Assessment and the activities done as part of Process Improvement must be assessed at the corporate level and not at the project level.
Next Week: Scheduling Test Cycles
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Quality Assurance Process Improvement – Part 1
Quality Assurance Process Improvement is the next topic in our Blog Series. We completed a series of 4 on Assessments and at the end of the Assessment process a lot of organizations tend not to act on the results if they do not have a plan for moving forward. This is particularly true if the Assessment has not been tailored to the particular company. A standardised Assessment process generates standard recommendations which may not be applicable. Make sure you detail your expectations at the beginning of the Assessment so you get value from the process and your expenditure of time.
Assuming that you have the results of an Assessment available, the next step is often some sort of Process Improvement. So what is Process Improvement?
We define Process Improvement as a planned and measured activity that leads to a better process.
Planned – Process Improvement carried out without a plan is simply change for the sake of change with no knowledge of whether this is an improvement or not.
Measured – Measurements need to be taken both before and after the process improvement activity is completed. Before measurements provide a current baseline of how the process is currently operating. After measurements determine whether the process improvement activity has had the desired effect. Without both, there is no point to the process improvement.
Better Process – The measurement process tells us whether the process has improved at all. There is a number of things that could be measured. Maybe the process has got quicker; maybe it is cheaper in some way; maybe it is more consistent so the results are more similar; or maybe the end product or service generated from the process is better. It would be nice to get all four with one process improvement activity but frequently it will require multiple iterations of the process improvement cycle to start realising gains on all four items.
Next Week: Coming Meetings