Optimize Your SQA Practice Using a Full Lifecycle Approach
Apply SQA across critical development process steps to ensure quality all the way to product delivery.
- Your software quality assurance (SQA) program is using the wrong set of metrics to measure how process improvements influence product quality improvements.
- Roles & responsibilities and quality assurance initiatives are not well defined and need to be allocated to individuals that can be held responsible for quality-related issues.
- You are finding it hard to determine a causation between SQA process improvements and an improvement in product quality.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Your product is only as good as your process. A robust development and SQA process creates artifacts that are highly testable, easily maintained, and strongly traceable across the development lifecycle, ensuring that the product delivered meets expectations set out by the business.
- A small issue within your development process can have a ripple effect on the level of product quality. Discover what you don’t know and identify areas within your SQA practice that require attention.
Impact and Result
- SQA must be viewed as more than defect analysis and testing. Instead, place greater emphasis on preventative measures to ensure application quality across the entire development lifecycle.
- IT must create a comprehensive SQA plan that delineates roles and responsibilities as they relate to quality assurance. Ensure tasks and procedures improve process efficiency and quality, and formalize metrics that help to implement a continuous improvement cycle for SQA.
- Our methodology provides simple-to-follow steps to develop an SQA plan that provides clear insight into your current quality assurance practices.
- Establish a synchronous relationship between the business and IT to help stakeholders understand the importance and relative value of quality assurance tasks to current costs.
Member Testimonials
After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.
10.0/10
Overall Impact
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
Virginia Department of the Treasury
Workshop
10/10
N/A
N/A
Good thought provoking discussions. Dynamic host that kept it interesting. Thank you!
Ville de Laval
Guided Implementation
8/10
$95,000
47
Application Development Quality
Approach SQA with the realization that it is to be applied across critical development process steps to ensure quality all along the way of product delivery.
This course makes up part of the Applications Certificate.
- Course Modules: 4
- Estimated Completion Time: 2-2.5 hours
- Featured Analysts:
- Jeff Forbes, Research Director, Applications Practice
- David Piazza, VP of Research & Advisory, Applications Practice
Workshop: Optimize Your SQA Practice Using a Full Lifecycle Approach
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Assess Your Current SQA Capabilities
The Purpose
- To help you assess and understand your current SQA capabilities as well as the degree to which metric objectives are being met.
Key Benefits Achieved
- An analysis of current SQA practices to provide insight into potential inefficiencies, opportunities, and to provide the business with sufficient rationale for improving current quality assurance initiatives.
Activities
Outputs
Conduct a high-level assessment of where to focus your current state analysis.
- Understanding of current overall development process and where it is most weak in the context of quality assurance
Document your high-level development process.
Create a RACI chart to understand roles and responsibilities.
Perform a SIPOC-MC analysis for problem areas identified in your SDLC.
- Understanding of assigned roles and responsibilities across development teams, including individuals who are involved with making quality-related decisions for artifact hand-off
Identify the individual control points involved with passing software artifacts through SDLC stages being assessed.
Identify problem areas within your SDLC as they relate to SQA.
- Identification of problem areas within SQA process for further analysis
Module 2: Define SQA Target State Processes
The Purpose
- To help you identify and define SQA processes and metrics needed to meet quality objectives set out by development teams and the business.
Key Benefits Achieved
- A revised list of key SQA tasks along with metrics and associated tolerance limits used universally for all development projects.
Activities
Outputs
Establish SQA metrics and tolerance limits across your SDLC.
- Identification of the appropriate metrics and their associated tolerance limits to provide insights into meeting quality goals and objectives during process execution
Determine your target state for SQA processes within the define/design stage of the SDLC.
Determine your target state for SQA processes within the development stage of the SDLC.
Determine your target state for SQA processes within the testing stage of the SDLC.
Determine your target state for SQA processes within the deploy/release stage of the SDLC.
- Identification of target state SQA processes that are required for ensuring quality across all development projects
Module 3: Prioritize SQA Optimization Initiatives and Develop Optimization Roadmap
The Purpose
- Based on discovered inefficiencies, define optimization initiatives required to improve your SQA practice.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Optimization initiatives and associated tasks required to address gaps and improve SQA capabilities.
Activities
Outputs
Determine optimization initiatives for improving your SQA process.
- Prioritized list of optimization initiatives for SQA
Gain the full scope of effort required to implement your SQA optimization initiatives.
- Assessment of level of effort for each SQA optimization initiative
Identify the enablers and blockers of your SQA optimization.
- Identification of enablers and blockers for optimization initiatives
Define your SQA optimization roadmap.
- Identification of roadmap timeline for implementing optimization initiatives
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 5 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Assess your current SQA capabilities
- Call 1: Assess current state
- Call 2: Review current state findings
Guided Implementation 2: Define SQA target state processes
- Call 1: Assess target state processes
- Call 2: Consider optimization initiatives
Guided Implementation 3: Determine optimization initiatives for improving your SQA practice
- Call 1: Prioritize SQA optimization initiatives
Contributors
- Subu Baskaran, Senior Product Manager, Sencha
- Emilio Chemali, Director of Strategic Business Intelligence & Analytics, MRE Consulting
- Capers Jones, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Namcook Analytics
- Alan Page, Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft
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