Tag: Quality Assurance

We have all heard them. We provide a small list here obtained from online media in the last few months.

• Technical issue forces early closure on Toronto Stock Exchange as markets fall
• Information about 69,000 Phoenix pay system victims sent in error
• A company sent an Ohio man 55,000 copies of a letter
• Federal IT systems at risk of ‘critical failure,’ (Canada)
• Air Canada system failure at check-in kiosks strands hundreds; delays flights
• Toronto is furious about Metrolinx’s claim that Presto cards rarely malfunction
• Luxury resort overcharges customers by thousands, then ignores them

This is only a small subset of what we have in the list and the oldest one in the list above is less than 2 months old. These are all within the first two months of 2020!

A couple of questions come to mind:

• How much did all the above errors cost (or might still cost in the future)?
• How much of that cost could have been (or could be) avoided by proper application of QA principles?

We all know defects and problems cost more the further into the process one has gone. Later defects (inside or outside software) are almost always more expensive. Some suggestions:

1. Invest in a QA Assessment to see what you need in terms of QA. A good assessment will tell you what you need and a roadmap will tell you how to get there.
2. Take the time to review the assessment and apply the appropriate improvements.
3. Set up checkpoints to ensure that the process is not diverging from what was planned.
4. Invest in coaching sessions to resolve any issues that arise (before they become a problem).

Give us a call to continue the discussion. We have supplied Assessment, Coaching, Consulting Management and Training to Financial, Telecommunications, Utlities, NFP, and Government to name just a few

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Resources are one of the awkward issues in QA.

• Do you go with a QA resource and hope to teach them the business?
• Do you go with someone who knows the business and hope to teach them QA?
• Does your resource require specialised technical knowledge (not directly related to a test tool)?
• Does your resource require extensive knowledge of a specific Test Tool?
• What about leading or managing the QA effort?
• Do you wish you had someone who considered the long term impacts? This usually comes up after the project is over.

What everyone wants is all of the above and that almost never occurs.

In late December we heard two sides of the argument about Quality Assurance(QA) and Artificial Intelligence(AI).

Side one from a Financial Executive: ‘AI will do away with the need for testing, testers, and QA’.

Side two from a Quality Assurance Guru: ‘AI will mean more work than ever for QA.

We tend to think it will be somewhere in the middle.

1. AI will automate some tasks that are now done manually. We are already seeing this with some of the tools. This process has been ongoing for a long time.
2. AI will change the way programming is done. As a recent article stated: Some of the programs were very simple; the data, however, was critical and every change in data lead to very different results.
3. Following along with the point from above; AI wil allow us to do things in software that we could not have done before. This is already occurring.
4. However, we will still have to test this to make sure we are using the right data and drawing the correct conclusions.

QA is going to need to know how to understand, find, and load unbiased data.

QA will need to understand and test how the conclusions are drawn, rather than what the actual results are at the time of test execution.

This will impact everything we do from setup, to data provisioning, to execution and reporting. Test planning might escape the maelstorm but we would not bet on it.

Happy 2020’s

Give us a call to continue the discussion.

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