Quality Assurance Methodology
Our QA methodology involves the entire software development process including Project Management, Requirements Management, Development, and Testing . Our Core Processes are the foundation of our Test Program. They support Manual, Automated and Performance testing.
It is important to have a strong foundation on which to build your QA Program. Our methodology has evolved from more than 10 years of testing experience. For us QA is part of the development process not something performed at the end of the development cycle.
We can work with many types of software development methodologies from traditional Waterfall to Agile. We customize our approach for you and your organization.
The first step is to understand your Business Requirements, Risk Tolerance, and Quality Goals.
Business Requirements relate to your offering and position in the marketplace. For example, are you always first to market, are you known for high quality, are you the only vendor in the market, is your product mission critical, etc. Risk Tolerance relates to your willingness to accept risk in order to achieve your Quality Goals. For example, are you willing to do less testing and potentially increase defects (risk) in order to get to market sooner or to decrease costs? Quality Goals are what you desire to achieve from your Quality Assurance activities. Quality Goals may be understood in terms of the Quality Triangle. The factors of Quality, Cost, and Time are interrelated. Quality relates to overall product quality and not just defect levels. It includes product usability, performance, and overall customer satisfaction. Cost relates to the available budget available for QA. Time relates to the amount of time it takes to get your product to market.
Examples of Quality Goals include:
- Reducing the length of the Test Cycle and time to market (Time)
- Assuring an acceptable quality or defect level (Quality)
- Reducing QA Costs or working within a particular budget (Cost)
Once Business Requirements, Risk Tolerance, and Quality Goals are defined an approach can be developed to achieve the Quality Goals. The approach includes the various techniques that will be used to achieve the Quality Goals.
Examples of Quality Techniques include:
- Automated Testing
- Manual Testing
- Performance Testing
- Project Management
- Requirements Management
- Exploratory Testing
Once your Business Requirements, Risk Tolerance, Quality Goals, and Quality Techniques have been defined the Innosphere Testing Process (ITP) is used to develop a custom Test Program. This is comprised of an approach based on our Core Processes