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Customers often want to know more about our approach to test services, software test methodology and quality risk management. Here are the most commonly asked questions that we hear about the business challenges facing organisations today.
Click on the question to see our response. Alternatively go straight to Solutions if you know what you want.
Questions
On time delivery
Reduced test costs
Fewer defects in production
Process improvement
Risk reduction
Improved test efficiency and effectiveness
Improved operational efficiency and effectiveness
Independent compliance verification
Your questions answered
Our testing cycle is taking too long and causing late delivery, but everything we test is critical – how can we change this? 
Managing testing scope and delivery time is always a difficult balance for project teams. Moreover, testing phases are often covers for feature creep and last-minute patches.
Project teams often feel that their testing cycle is untouchable and to change it is a risk in itself.
Our understanding of best practice and risk-based testing can assist in enabling earlier go-live decisions, based upon an informed assessment of the situation. Just ask us how you can get better quality systems delivered – faster.
We want some testers. Have you got some?
Yes, but what kind of testers are you looking for? Is it testing that you want, or would you prefer us to own the responsibility for quality? How about a solution that minimises the risk of defects?
When you ask us for a tester, we’ll make sure that we deliver what you actually want – be it a solution, ownership of quality assurance, a working product, the right advice… But if all you really need is a tester or two, we can do that too.
How can you help us gain from offshoring our testing while minimising the associated risk to quality and delivery?
Offshore labour provides significant cost savings. In some situations testing can be decoupled from, or joined with, other efforts and sent offshore. We know this, because we employ and work with external offshore teams. We also know the risks and how best to manage issues such as distance, time-zones, turnover rates, cultural relations and not least, communication. Most offshore projects that fail do so through small misunderstandings, which go unnoticed until far too late in the cycle.
Talk to us about whether offshore testing is right for your company or project. Not only will we listen, but we’ll also relate and understand.
Can you put into hard figures how much testing costs us and quantify the benefits in a way that makes sense?
Testing can be a black hole for your money. Put money in, but nothing tangible appears to come out. Even where assets such as scripts, reports or automated harnesses are produced, what value, if any, do they hold? Are these assets that your shareholders will appreciate? Quantifying this into hard currency is even more difficult than identifying vague costs and anecdotal benefits.
Ask us how. We’ll tell you how much you are spending, how much you should be spending and what the true value of your testing effort is.
We lack trust and confidence in our quality assurance process – can you help?
We recognise that all software suffers from some bugs. However when a disproportionately high number of defects occur it should raise an alarm that perhaps your testing processes are inefficient or you may even be doing too much testing but focusing on the wrong things.
We’ll tell you whether you’re addressing the right issues, using the right people and whether your expectations are realistic. Our independent test facility can, without prejudice, review your processes. Our QA Health Check will consider past and present challenges, then make recommendations going forward, empowering you to decide how to move your quality assurance processes forward with confidence.
We’re about to kick-off a project and want to set up a proper quality assurance framework from the start. Could you advise us?
Yes!
Many client questions relate to the testing process. Invariably had expert advice been sought from the start, these issues could be avoided. Contact us to see how you could benefit from our experience in planning or how you could cost-effectively outsource the entire quality remit to a company that takes the responsibility and delivers.
We’re confused about testing in an Agile development framework – can you help?
Scrum, XP… Agile. Conventional waterfall models for testing seem to fall down in the dynamic flow of Agile development. Gone are the days of spending six months to develop test scripts and eight weeks to test. You need a responsive and flexible team that is able to understand how to test the old and new stuff in an environment of rapidly changing parameters.
Contact us to see how we integrate solid testing principles with various development methodologies. With our experience of systems integration we understand, at first-hand, the quality benefits and challenges of development styles and how to test within them to play to their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses.
What is risk-based testing and is it right for us?
As budgets and deadlines are squeezed, testers are often put into an unenviable position. What tests should they cut out of a suite before signing off the system as ‘perfect’? When managers are busy juggling budgets and resources, it’s sometimes hard for those testing at the ground-level to make decisions regarding quality and business exposure.
We can explain how to direct your testing scope to the most risky areas of your system, understanding probability and impact of risk. Our risk modelling – as used for the Olympic Games – ensures that scope decisions are made scientifically.
We don’t understand whether our automated testing generates a positive return on investment or is a waste of time. Can you advise us?
While the test automation team may always be busy and working hard at something, is it the right thing, are they using the right tools and are they removing the right risks? The automated demo may have looked good but is it improving software quality? Is it worth the cost and how much will it cost to keep up-to-date compared with manual testing?
We understand that the primary purpose of automated testing is labour reduction in the quality assurance effort. All other benefits of automated testing – more scope plus faster, more frequent test cycles, etc – stem from the reduction in manual effort. With this in mind, we can advise whether test automation is appropriate to you and how to implement it so that you achieve your return on investment.
Do we need to keep buying new hardware in response to poor system performance?
In the absence of good performance and load statistics then system and resource procurement is an uncertain guessing game. To get the best from your IT systems, the IT enhancements need to be planned, measured and co-ordinated to meet the growth expectations.
We can execute business loads on your system and identify your current and future IT bottlenecks. Having the experience in testing large system integration projects, we can tune your systems to get the best out of your equipment for the specific load and business usage patterns that you have. Where tuning alone is not enough we can advise you where your IT investment would be best spent to maximise the benefit to your business.
How can we mitigate the impact of a new marketing campaign on the system performance and capability for our existing business?
The system is working fine and customer orders are being processed smoothly within the SLA. However, when a new marketing campaign starts or a nationwide promotion goes on TV suddenly your customers are interested in just one specific part of your product range. The result can be that parts of the system become overloaded and performance drops dramatically. Sometimes this new business can be to the detriment of your existing product revenue.
Contact us to hear how careful performance and load modelling of future marketing campaigns can reveal those hotspots before they impact your business. We can determine the system load statistics you need in order to make a quantifiable judgement on the investment needed to maximise both old and new product revenues.
We’re concerned about system load and performance – how many people can our current system support?
You may worry how many users you can support, but have you considered other issues, such as how your system handles peak usage, daily or monthly patterns, sustained usage or unexpected spikes? Understanding load and performance is considered an arcane art for much of the industry, with many tools vendors claiming “silver-bullet” solutions.
We can help you to understand all your load and performance risks then test the scenarios where you feel most exposed. It’s not about giving you a number in green for go or red to stop, it’s about giving you confidence that your system will do what it’s supposed to, when it’s supposed to, within your budget. And if it comes to making decisions, we’ll offer procedural alternatives to ‘throwing more hardware at it’. That’s how we add value as system integrators, developers and architects.
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