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Building a Testing Centre of Excellence
Celfocus is embracing testing as an essential competency and is bringing this mission to a whole new level through the Testing Centre of Excellence (TCOE).
Building a TCOE entails adopting an approach across the organization that includes processes, people and technology by delivering highly efficient testing services through knowledge, best practices and resources. In this ever-changing technology landscape, Celfocus has accomplished the benefits of a TCOE, through a framework for assessment and by building a roadmap to improve effectiveness and efficiency of the testing function:
- Assess Testing maturity
- Prioritize initiatives and mark quick news
- Design and implement initiatives across the organization
- Measure and communicate value derived from TCOE
- Standardize and simplify processes, tools and methods
- Promote continuous improvement
During 2017, Celfocus has implemented some key initiatives by reinforcing a culture of quality, promoting standard testing practices, consolidating testing tools and providing specialized testing services:
Root Cause Analysis for defects
By analysing issues and identifying its main causes, Root Cause Analysis (RCA), a team can take actions to prevent similar problems from occurring in the future. With several benefits, RCA process improves Testing efficiency, by taking time to think about problems from first principles and then deal with the causes rather than the effects. RCA saves costs and time, as quick fixes require staff to repeat the same tasks over and over again.
I really believe that RCA, helps us identify the real reason for the recurring issues (most common ones) we face in a Project lifecycle. This analysis provides pertinent information, in order to identify potential solutions to increase the quality of deliveries.
The inclusion of the RCA allow us to easily identify the reasons for the defects reported in SIT phase (and later in the UAT) and take actions to avoid some of these problems.
From a management perspective, the RCA allow us to timely identify some risks and mitigate them proactively even during project execution, for example, a large number of defects may be related to recurring errors, or related to the lack of experience of the team (seniority of the team, being very junior).
Quality Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for project delivery
This initiative consists on the implementation of measurement tools to indicate how well teams are achieving specific project delivery goals, such as Defect Density, Defect Reopen Density, Retest Density, Closed & Cancelled Defect Root Cause Densities and Defects Removal Efficiency.
The use of quality KPI’s allowed the project management to identify hidden issues in the project solution as well hidden issues in the governance process.
Quality Assurance assessments in project delivery
Assessing quality of project delivery relies on a number of principles whose intent is to make the assessment become an effective and reliable tool that supports organization's management policies and procedures, providing objective information that the organization can act upon to continually improve the performance.
The findings and recommendations of this assessment will help us to improve the results in future projects.
Standardized Test Execution Report
Test Execution Reports provide information regarding the status of the testing activities, including overall software quality and test execution progress against the planned progress. With TCOE’s practices, we are ensuring:
- Standardize procedures related to test execution reports
- Appropriate analysis of the information and metrics
- Effective communication of the test progress and findings to other project stakeholders
- An iterative process and a tool for continuous improvement
The standardization of the Test Execution Report is a great achievement to have the same template in all CelFocus projects because, with this, we have a better reading and understanding of the Test Status information (all the Project’s reports are read in the same way).
Quality Assurance Checklist
A quality checklist can ensure consistency and completeness in carrying out quality assurance tasks related to Entry & Exit Criteria in all project life cycle.
TCOE represents an organizational commitment to software quality. Through the initiatives implemented in 2017, TCOE intends to play an active role in the decision making in all Celfocus projects and reinforce its role as a fundamental pillar in Quality Assurance in current and future projects.
This checklist allow us, in the QA team, to never forget what we need to do in which new testing milestone. It is like going to the shopping with a note to don’t forget to buy something.
In 2017, the initiatives implemented across our organization helped reinforce a culture of quality, promoted standard testing practices, consolidated testing tools and provided specialized testing services.
In the future, TCOE will continue to assure and reinforce the use of these initiatives in all Celfocus projects as a project management tool. However, to do so we strongly believe everyone’s engagement is crucial.
Want to know more?
Feel free to contact us celfocusqualityassurancemanagement@celfocus.com
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