An Ever Growing Tussle Between Product And Quality Leads

For generations there is a fundamentally ongoing fight between the product team and the quality team of any project. This is a generic fight for which there has not been a solution found so far. The fight is as below.

Product manager and his team always think that their product is fantastically built as per customer requirement with 100% requirements business needs met while building it. And the product is bug free. They further have a mindset that the product when goes to quality for internal testing on a test bed similar to live environment, the testing team takes extra long time with an intention of overstretching the whole exercise of testing just to maintain their importance intact. 

According to product team 90% of the bugs are either unnecessarily listed to build the test report long with large number of bug findings or the similar kind of bugs are repeated for the same purpose.

Top 5 Priorities Of A Test Lead For 2014

The success of a project is driven by the teams that work on it. Besides various other factors and logistics, it is always the team that matters most because static and non living things do not think and act according to changing environment and conditions but it is the human mind that has an ability to work efficiently even under stressed and constrained conditions. That is why the people factor remains on top always.

For Test Lead top 5 priorities on card for the year 2014 would be:

1. Requirements: Understanding of customer and business requirements beyond what has been documented by the analysts will be very important. It will be good if QC guy gets a chance to walk through the business process of the customer thoroughly.

2. Documentation: Documentation includes a lot and means a lot for QC. Right from test case building, test report, bug closure report and so on.

3. Experience: Testing is one expertise and business knowledge is another. Former comes from learning and education whereas latter comes from experience and wisdom. A tester needs to have both these expertise in a balanced form so as to align both the roads properly.

4. Team: Management of team, allocation of resources and retaining the best of resources is an art that needs to be learnt and managed.

5. Learning: Learning is a process that needs to be built in a structured manner. Learning must come from each project, each success, each failure and so on.

Top 5 Projects In Demand During 2014

5 type of projects will be in high demand during 2014 as listed below:

1. Education: Projects based on education delivery in a smarter way will in
    demand globally.

2. Retail: Systems to make retail business more comfortable, versatile and
    widely acceptable.

3. Security & Privacy: Demand will be high in making systems more
    secured while keeping privacy intact over the internet/ cloud.

4. Health: Global health management systems will be high in demand.

5. Governance: Management of public utilities, systems and facilities in an
    automated secured manner.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/top-5-projects-in-demand-during-2014/

Impact Of Changes In Requirements And Commitment On Project Delays

For a successful project, the credit goes to the whole team. But for a project delayed or failed the one man in crisis is the project manager. Whatsoever the reasons may be for this delay/ failure but it is the project manager that has to bear the brunt. Let us look at the topmost reasons that cause project delay or project failure:

1. Change Management: The initial requirements from customer leads to development but as the work progresses, fresh requirements or changes in the existing requirements keep pumping in from customer end. There is no wonder about it to happen and one should take it as a natural phenomenon. After releasing their initial set of requirements, customer think tank keeps pondering over what else could be achieved which lead to these requirements. Critical part is to grab these requirements with a positive note, analyze well and segregate these requirements to two parts – to be added, or to be reverted back to customer with a justification for not adding it.

2. Commitment: For business critical apps development there is a deep rooted commitment required from each section, from each of the stakeholder. If that does not happen, there are chances of missing some important handling in time that could lead to a big disaster if raised at a later stage. It has been seen that if customer key users are not engaged well in time initially during the development phase for clearing off units built have higher risk of facing major setbacks in progress of project.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/impact-of-changes-in-requirements-and-commitment-on-project-delays/

3 Fundamental Pillars To Drive Your Project To Success

Methodology & Approach: Every project does not fall in a generic project methodology. It is important to understand the type of project before making it enlisted under a particular project methodology. For this, based on the projects undertaken and new upcoming ones, relevant project methodologies to be identified and defined. Right project methodology helps project manager and other teams to ensure following right processes and documentations for each project phase in that methodology. A new project marked in wrong methodology could lead to extreme level of confusion and thus leading to failures.

Issue Management: Issues are integral part of any project arising during any of the phases of a project. Taking issues in a lighter way could lead to losing the right direction of a project and hence getting it derailed from its progress track. A single issue management charter with process driven approach with right & understandable definition of issue, its categorization, its severity and its closure with identification of ‘who’ is responsible for closure of issue, is very important. Any issue, howsoever small, could lead to a big disaster. A regular review is a must.

Communications: Be it project management, team management or issues management; nothing will move in right direction, if inappropriate or incomplete or missing communications happen during a project. Project manager must ensure to graduate each of the team members and team leads on how to handle communications and its importance. Right kind of information, to right people, at right time with right kind of actions required must be a set protocol of communications. For example, if a piece of information is just for the sake of information, or an action is required, along with its criticality, should be the right approach to manage.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/3-fundamental-pillars-to-drive-your-project-to-success/

Why Date Constrained Projects Go Uncontrolled?

It happens at times when you have a mission critical project with tight timelines from customer that increases its stake manifold, for which you place best of your teams comprising of high skills and experience, and on top of it you provide state of the art tools to tackle all kind of situations; and still the timelines are not met and things go out of control. It is always important to go for a deep analysis for such kind of failures to such an extent that the shortfalls are identified with their core reasons; and are sidelined once for all, for all forthcoming similar kind of projects.

It is well said that disciplined approach and hard work pay well in comparison to merely hard work. Well defined processes and procedures play a major role in this. If these are in place, it makes your tasks easier in managing and guiding your teams. Since there is no differentiation among teams and the standard procedures apply to everyone, irrespective of who and what, the same procedures need to be followed.

Growing these skills is as important for immature teams, as is for matured teams to keep nurturing and excelling in these.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/why-date-constrained-projects-go-uncontrolled/

3 Critical Weapons For Winning A Battle Called Project Management

If you really want to be a successful project manager you need to acquire following three powerful weapons so as to be a winner all the time whether the conditions are favorable or you are travelling in rough seas. The teams that are formed usually have all mixes of human beings having different styles of working and delivering results in different fashions. Overall momentum is something which need to be maintained all the time to race along the ticking clock. The three important and potent weapons that can help you are as below:

Skills: You need to have high quality project management skills to win your battle. If you are leading a team of unbeatable and brave soldiers but lacking the same in you, would not lead you to a winning situation.

Tools: Whether it is project management tools, bug tracking tools or incident recording tools – you need to assess your needs and acquire these tools accordingly. Overstuffing yourself beyond required commodities will lead to a burden on your head. But vice versa also holds equally good meaning if you are underestimating your needs and go for the battle along with your team with shortage of armory, your defeat is sealed right in the beginning.

Experience: Guys with rich experience under their belt and laurels shining on their shirts are always moral boosters in the teams. Hence it is important to have such guys, at least one in each team to keep overall tempo at high pitch all the time.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/3-critical-weapons-for-winning-a-battle-called-project-management/

All Projects Face Budget Constraints

Budget for any project is allocated right at its initiation phase. Budgeting includes lot of factors but the main factor remains customer defined timelines. Keeping this target defined by customer in mind, a backward calculation is done and accordingly time allocation to each phase is done, team sizing is defined and resource planning is done. After all it is customer that matters the most.

Well, it does not mean that there is a scope of comparison even if this backward calculation is being done. Two prime factors that play a major role in this whole game is quality and finances. Budgeting beyond optimum level and compromising with quality of the product will mar the beauty of product and impact on business badly. When timelines are shorter there is another way of pulling your socks and not letting you beaten down. It requires higher level of skilled task force, error free tools and rich experience to win over in such kind of wars.

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/all-projects-face-budget-constraints/

Meaning of CTTR In Project Management

Project Management mainly comprises of converting customer requirements and business needs to an application so as to enable customer in running its business in a much smoother and error free environment. It needs to be imbibed of business processes, workflow (if required by customer) and minimization of manual interventions to a maximum extent. Any business process that speaks about business enhancement, improvisation and optimization by transforming it from manual to automation enabled through coding needs to be thrown into a dustbin.

Timelines of a project are mostly defined as per customer guidelines. At times it is important for a customer to get a solution within a stipulated time frame if the app is related to a pre-scheduled launch in a big way and the app is going to play a major role in that particular launch. Usually a project where customer has no say in desired results’ release timelines especially when it is a customer sponsored project, it is definitely a major glitch. Either the requirements are not serious or customer has no intentions to pay for the product later.

CTTR is Customer Time To Release which means the timelines defined by the customer regarding release of product. All project timelines, budgeting and allocations are a total derivative of CTTR.

Source: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/quality-assurance/meaning-of-cttr-in-project-management/

Capturing Customer Requirement Is Mandatory To Get Signed Off

Capturing business requirement is a cumbersome process in many aspects. For some it might become difficult to capture concrete requirements if business is not process oriented and documentation centric. In such conditions there would be as many statements misaligned with each other as many mouths. Each member engaged even in a similar or same process might talk differently regarding the same process which could lead to a big confusion. In such conditions everybody would be eager to speak but nobody to vet the stated requirement.

In certain other conditions, systems in place could be too cumbersome that your timelines for closure of requirements capturing would definitely get shattered. Here, in this case, you would be running after the process owner, who would be rich in process knowledge and practical experience, but he would not be able to give you substantial time to help you in capturing requirements in multiple runs.

Requirement capturing goes useless if there are some ambiguities or misalignment that stops it for sign off. It is important to opinion from everyone who is part of a process in the organization and then a proper alignment needs to be done, if required, by involving top management into it.

Test Cases Base – Customer Requirement or Development Requirements?

I recently met with a test team with an excellent performance record. For all the applications where it had given a green have a track record of zero major bug encounter post its launch and 100% customer satisfaction with timely sign off. Definitely the credit goes to this test lead and his team. It was a point of curiosity at my end to know what was their process and methodology to give such a tremendous performance.

Their logic was very clear and crisp. The team lead had made a rule that during all customer requirements capturing by business analysis team – one QC member will be part of the team. Customer requirement finalization doc once signed by customer would be shared with testing team. The testing team, on getting customer requirements documents, would immediately start building test cases where on the other hand, requirements have reached to development team for preparing development plan, testing plan and release date.

While the development team is busy with meeting with their timelines, test team members had a clear cut charter of brainstorming and finalization of test cases built on the basis of customer requirements purely.

Project Plan and Project Plan Monitoring Are Two Different Entities

Project Plan is a onetime activity as and when a new project comes up. Project Manager or Project Lead prepares a project plan for the complete project while earmarking milestones to be achieved thereby measuring project movement towards its closure. Well said and done, if an organization or project team lives on this project plan till the completion of project without measuring the actual achievements scored at a shorter and prescribed frequency, it could lead to a disaster.

That is where project plan monitoring comes into picture where during regular project review meetings the initial plan is measured against the actual tasks completed at their stipulated time. It is a well-known fact that a delay in meeting one deadline for release of a milestone or completion of a task has recursive negative impact on project overall. That is why a regular review is very important and a dashboard where plan versus actual timelines against each task is shared with all relevant stakeholders.

Teams engaged in more visibility feel more satisfied and get an automatic momentum and thrust to meet their timelines.

Demand Of Quality Professionals Is On High And Will Remain So

Quality is a lot more that identifying and controlling defects. With increasing dependencies on business applications be it on server, mobile or web; is demanding more and more professionals who are capable of this paradigm shift and are intelligent enough to accept the challenge. One of the major areas to be focused in Quality is about understanding of existing processes and efforts towards their enhancements and optimizations.

Business software application is a basic requirement of any business these days. Businesses are emphasizing more on automation, consolidation and integration. Innovation and improvement is always welcomed in this field. With the exponential increase in software industry in the global arena, emphasis on quality needs, its optimization and adherence to processes is becoming more and more important.

The software industry is growing steadily with clear cut demarcation of boundaries. The applications are being built keeping in mind to cater to global market rather than the local area. Because of this fast growth in software industry, there is an increasing demand of quality professionals which will keep increasing in coming years.

Business Needs More Serious Quality Professionals Than Developers

There is a huge shift in mindset regarding scope of quality in software industry. Given the fact that dependency of business is increasing on applications, the adverse impact of any flaw bypassed during quality might impact business heavily. A small transaction leading to a wrong calculation due to a bug could cost a high amount to the business. Quality therefore has a higher amount of significance in today’s scenario.

Development process is supposed to ensure complete adherence to customer requirements and business alignment thereby making it useful for customer else there remains a never ending fight between the customer and delivery organizations regarding the gaps left un-addressed. Even if there is some gaps remain in the final deliverable and those ‘asked for’; it should be closed at the earliest with mutual consent. This can happen only when the development team gives some valid reasons for not filling those gaps due to what so ever constraints and customer agrees to it. Hence due to this higher stake of correctness of coding adhering to customer requirements, it becomes very important for quality to pitch in and ensure a zero defect product.

There has to be a good balance between coding and testing throughout the development cycle. For this, a tester’s knowledge about requirements and product in questions is as critical as it is for development team.

Three Focus Areas To Deliver A Healthy And Delighting Product

Software industry depends highly on quality of product. Bug encountered during and post production but before launch always cost in terms of time and money. Fixing a bug might take a small chunk of time but retesting again is a time consuming job which is required to ensure the impact of bug fixed should not degrade or put a negative impact elsewhere in functionality or business process. Quality again has to play a major role but the onus lies on development team also to ensure a bug free ‘bug fixing’.

Three important acts to perform during product development in a continuous manner can be listed as below:

1. Reviewing Process: Regular reviews, on one hand are quite important; and on the other hand, it is also important to keep reviewing the processes defined for development and testing of a product. The team, process and timelines need to be aligned tightly so as to ensure no leakages during development or after the release of product.

2. Customer Requirements: It is not a one-time exercise to capture customer requirements and then start development in closed doors. This will always lead to failures and disasters in the short and long term, both. It is very important to keep customer engaged during every iteration, internal releases, and milestones completions.

3. Best Practices: How so ever best your practices may be as per your claims, but there is always a scope of improvement, without any doubt.

Quality Is Nothing But QA, QC and Compliance

Typically the vast scope of quality can be divided into three major streams – Quality Control (QC), Quality Assurance (QA) and Compliance. All three streams are critical for any organization engaged in software development activities – be it as a vendor or for internal use. In any case – an internal development team of an organization also more or less is like a vendor which has to ensure smooth delivery and functioning of the products they develop and deploy within their organization.

Scope of Quality Control (QC) is limited to product’s handling, testing, reliability, stability, bug finding, maintaining testing reports and ensuring compliance of documents required for the purpose of audits. QC is responsible for inspection of the product in all aspects from user and business perspective. Code testing and testing of product for the purpose of finding bugs, reporting, maintaining data and its history, getting bugs fixed, retesting, and ensuring finally that the product goes for release with no bugs or leakages. Test cases, test specifications and testing are very important. Retesting of product post fixing of bugs by development team is as critical and needs to be as exhaustive as first time testing of the product.

Scope of Quality Assurance (QA) is to ensure keep evolving best practices, ensure its compliance and adherence with continuous effort to uplift quality standards of the organization and teams by means of training, documentation, audits and change control mechanism. QA is required to be focused more towards compliance and adherence of processes in place. A re-assessment of processes in place is required to be done from time to time. External certification of global standard and regular audits by them always helps in this respect.

Project Approach and Project Execution

The project approach that is defined and signed off at the start of a project has to be followed by each person involved in the project during the development and execution of a project. It is assumed that initiation phase meets its timelines most of the time and most of the hiccups arise during a project are either during development phase or its execution phase. Progress of a project is measured by means of objectively defined milestones, targets and releases defined with their timelines.

Any timeline anticipated in getting delayed to its execution needs to be alarmed as soon as comes into notice. Appropriate actions need to be taken so as to get the train back on track rather than wasting much time in postmortem of delays happened. Though analysis and in-depth probing is definitely a solid tool for learning of factors that caused delays and helping in future projects in controlling those factors, it can be done post release of major milestones or at a stage when the project is passing through happy state.

Ultimate goal of any project is to get what was planned during initial phases – in right shape, in right time, and of committed quality.

Project Manager Needs To Be Self Driven To Drive Others

If you are a project manager in search of someone to push you or drive you, probably you are at a wrong foot of the ladder. The place where you are, as a project manager, have to ensure that your steering is in your own hands, you move in right direction, you move in right direction, and most importantly, you drive multiple vehicles besides driving your own, at the same time.

Well, that would be happening already, if you just look down to your regular exercise, the way you are driving your projects and teams. Good point is that you are already capable of driving yourself and others at the same time. Bad thing is that this art of driving yourself and others will get obsolete sooner or later unless you keep adding some value to it. Now, to add value to it, on a regular basis, you need to understand the factors (even minutest ones) that keep you motivated and boosted.

Some of these motivational factors in your life might not have ever been noticed by you, but you don’t afford them to go unnoticed for long, as these are your hidden treasures. And once you learn this art, don’t forget to download it to your aspirant team leaders, who shall be taking your place once you climb up the ladder.