Programme Level Testing Approach to meet Go-Live Date with Quality Assurance

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1 Annu Roy Mallikarjun Kukunoori Seshaiah V Uppala IBM India Pvt. Ltd. QAI - STC October 2012

2 Background Now-a-days, most of the big (which has a schedule of more than one year) projects driven by the customer s demand, have tough & stringent time-lines along with quality goals to be met. Challenges Most of the projects have a crunched Testing window. Due to any delay in earlier phases (Requirements/ Design/ Coding), the testing teams have to stretch and complete the testing activities to meet the Go-Live date. Even though, testing team is completing the activities, sometimes, quality might be somewhat compromised due to time pressure. Approach Planning the activities working backwards i.e. Go-Live date -> Testing -> Coding -> Design -> Requirements. In this approach, freeze dates were arrived for each of the phases and respective teams have to adhere to the schedule. In addition, criteria for quality gates for each of the phases viz., Requirements, Design, Coding and Testing, will be agreed and tracked.

3 Programme Group of Applications viz., Application 1, Application 2, etc. Application Set of Sub-Applications viz., Sub-Application 1, Sub-Application 2, etc.

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6 Application Group of sub-applications

7 Programme set of applications

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9 Quality Gates Quality gates are acceptance criteria reviews that can be used throughout the Programme. It can be seen as a set of predefined quality criteria that a software development project must meet in order to proceed from one stage of its lifecycle to the next. A Quality Review Board comprising of Business Leads, Test Manager, Build & Release Manager, will be responsible for creating the Acceptance / Exit Criteria for each of the Quality Gates and these criteria will be verified during the Quality Gate Review for that particular phase. Process Formal checklists of deliverables are used throughout the life cycle Checklists are reviewed and updated from time to time by the Quality Review Board Formal sign-off and acceptance at each Gate Any activities on the Gate cannot proceed without the sign-off for the previous Gate Assessment of the quality and integrity takes place during Quality Gate Reviews Information is assured to be communicated to the correct stakeholders (i.e., development to deployment)

10 Quality Gates Measurement Criteria - Quality Gate review Phase Gate Quality Gate (QG) Criteria Measurement of QG Criteria Requirements Requirements completion checkpoint Requirements (Use Cases, Business Rules, etc.) well defined, documented and signed off by customers. Requirements approved QG Reviewed by Quality Assurance Team, Application Lead and Lead BA Analysis & Design Design completion checkpoint High Level Design (HLD) is completed for the planned scope, reviewed and approved by Application Architect HLD approved Quality Assurance team, Application Lead and Application Architect. Construction Development completion Low Level Design (LLD) is LLD approved Quality Assurance team, (Coding) checkpoint completed Application Lead and Coding is completed Application Architect. Unit Testing (UT) is completed and Unit Test Reports are available. Unit Testing pass % is within agreed limits Unit Testing pass % Eg. UT Pass % should minimum 95% Testing Test completion checkpoint Functional Test execution is completed Test Pass % Eg. Pass % should be minimum 95% Quality Assurance team, Application Lead and Test Manager No. of Sev1, Sev2 defects in open state Eg. Sev1 0 Sev2 0 No. of Sev3, Sev4 defects in open state Eg. Sev3 10 Sev4 30

11 Benefits Better planning and tracking in meeting the Go-Live date Quality is ensured through Quality Gate Reviews Minimizing project risk through phase-by-phase checklists Enabling Project Managers to communicate the process and build Quality directly Reducing development cycle time - getting it done right the first time Quality Gate Reviews helps in triggering early warning and hence appropriate actions would be taken to proceed in the project execution In addition, Customer satisfaction levels increases with the quality deliverables and within the schedule.

12 Usage and Recommendations This approach is being used in a major Govt. Sector client s project and we are seeing good results from this approach This approach can be used for any type of application / technology / domain This approach is extendable to the applications / programmes, which has multiple testing environments / cycles, as well