How do you detect bugs in

WHITE PAPER

Integrated Quality Approach– Building

Quality into the Product

by Venkatesh Veerachamy

the early stage, remove risks in product release and reducereworking costs? Integrated Quality Approach (IQA) is designed to address all these and more. Read on...

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Table of Contents

Aspire Systems - Transforming Product Development

1. Abstract.............................................................................................................. ............................................. 2 2. Primary challenges faced by stakeholders....................................................................................................... 2

3. IQA – An overview........................................................................................................................................... 2

4. Implementation of IQA ....................................................................................................................................6

4.1. Phase I – Requirement understanding and analysis.....................................................................6

4.2. Phase II – Development............................................................................................................... 6

4.3. Phase III – Testing..........................................................................................................................6

5. Benefits.............................................................................................................................................................7

6. Conclusion..................................................................................................................................................... ...8

7. About Aspire Systems.......................................................................................................................................8

1. Abstract

Dynamic business environments need mature testing processes & practices that can guarantee success rather than just cut costs. While testing has traditionally been regarded as a curative solution, the reality is that it is a preventive medicine that can enhance product capabilities and help meet business objectives.

Today, nearly 40% of a typical software project budget is allocated to testing. While the benefits of independent testing are now well recognized, organizations still face challenges in executing software testing to deliver good quality product.

This paper aims to provide an insight to Aspire’s Integrated Quality Approach (IQA) - An innovative approach that helps to detect bugs in early stage, remove risks in product release and reduce reworking costs.

2. Primary challenges faced by stakeholders

IQA has been developed to address the challenges faced by various stakeholders at every stage of the product development life cycle (PDLC). There are various stakeholders – Business Analysts (BA), Product Development Team, QA Team and the Management Team, who are primarily responsible for building and delivering QUALITY software product.

?Business Analyst

?Developer

?

?

3. IQA – An overview

IQA is designed to reduce defect leakage in the production environment, considering the challenges faced by different stakeholders. It is a unique approach to work collaboratively with all the stakeholders and gather requirements specification correctly to perform end-to-end testing.

? Delivered product doesn’t meet user’s requirements. ? Business requirements and end-user experience are not properly transformed into end product functionality ? Time spent to support different teams for requirements clarification is too high

? Requirements keep changing frequently and developers don’t get clarified on time ? Lack of product knowledge brings difficulty in analyzing requirements clearly

QA Team? Inadequate test coverage due to limited knowledge of the product

? The time available for regression testing is very less as the team always ends up in capturing requirements & code level issues in testing phase ? Change in requirements are not communicated consistently or on time

Management Team? Customer face a lot of issues after “Go Live”

? Re-working cost and effort increases exponentially

Integrated Quality Approach– Building Quality into the Product

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The QA team works as an integral part of the development to achieve 100 % test case coverage and test execution coverage. The IQA enables the QA team to analyze the objective of the system and the proper functioning of the system as well.

Generally, defects are injected and detected in all the phases of development life cycle. But, early detection of defects in the product development life cycle saves lot of time and cost. Fig 1.0 illustrates the statistics - the cost of a single bug found in various stages of software life cycle.

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Business Analyst

IQA

Product Manager

Development

QABeta

Testers

Implementation

Support

Integrated Quality Approach– Building Quality into the Product

Fig 1.0

Source - The International Association of Software Architects (IASA)

The above statistics clearly shows that bugs found during the user requirement, design or coding stages have little or no impact to project cost. However, when flaws are found during the system testing or user acceptance testing stages, costs can become rather significant.

How IQA works

The diagram given below provides a clear picture how IQA is different from the traditional one and how it works in a software development life cycle.

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I A S AThe Cost of a single software bug found in various stages of SoftwareLife Cycle

Found in Requirement

Found in Design

Found in Coding

Found in System Testing

Found in Testing

Found in Live Production

Cost:$0

Cost:$1

Cost:$10

Cost:$100

Cost:$1000

Cost:$~~~~~ Maximum Cost

Integrated Quality Approach– Building Quality into the Product

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Software Development Approach

Traditional IQA

Integrated Quality Approach– Building Quality into the Product

4. Implementation of the IQA :

4.1 Phase I – Requirement understanding and analysis

In this phase, all stakeholders involve in requirement understanding & analysis, which helps them to get a clear picture on the requirements, technical architecture and design.

1 Business analyst presents functional specification requirement to all stake holders

2 The team analyzes the requirements, architecture, technical design and usability

3 The QA team derives the system test suite from the architecture/design of the system

4 The QA team also involves itself in testing the functional specification requirements which helps them to find defects in the early stage of product development life cycle

Involving all stakeholders in this phase would help in reducing number of defects reported in later stage.

4.2 Phase II – Development

During development phase, QA Team performs functional testing on every new feature that is completed and passed on to unit testing. This ensures both the testing techniques (black box and white box) are done on every new feature implemented. Once unit and functional testing is passed on a feature / component, it would be ready for integration stage.

This process helps to reduce the number of defects arising from:

?Implemented logic?Coding standards?Naming conventions?Incorrect requirement?Memory leakage

4.3 Phase III – Testing

Before the build is ready for functional testing, QA team prepares test suites for all functional and non-functional testing types identified in the test strategy. Predominantly, all the test suites are reviewed by the product manager / business analyst, to ensure 100% requirement coverage in the test suites. Once the integration test is passed, the build undergoes regression testing on each identified testing type.

The QA team ensures 100 % test execution coverage during regression test in the entire supported test environments. Essentially, every build / release and test strategy should include:

?Unit Testing (using black box techniques)?Functional Testing?System Testing?Regression Testing?System Integration Testing?Business scenario testing, Acceptance Testing

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Integrated Quality Approach– Building Quality into the Product

QA Team should identify the right metrics for each phase (planning, test creation, test execution & defect metrics) and ensure continuous improvement. Defect metrics is vital in determining the effectiveness of testing process.

Classic examples of defect metrics could be:

?Pre-production defects vs. Post production defects ?Test case efficiency?Defects posted by QA Team vs. Defects rejected by product management team?Defect classification based on severity and priority?Defects injection phase vs. Defect detection phase

Acceptance Testing

Once the regression testing is over on the release candidate, build would be ready for acceptance testing. To obtain real end user scenario, the QA team discusses with Beta users and Support Team in order to collects the acceptance test scenarios.

Once acceptance test suite and release candidate is ready, QA team would perform acceptance testing and decide whether the build is ready for deployment in production environment.

5. Benefits –

While IQA has several benefits, few points have been highlighted here to ensure good quality of the product.

?Detects the defects in the early stage of the development cycle ?Reduces reworking cost & development cost?Increases test coverage?Reduces testing effort participation from Product Management Team, Development Team, Technical

Team & Support Team?QA Team becomes central knowledge repository

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Integrated Quality Approach– Building Quality into the Product

ABOUT ASPIRE SYSTEMS

Aspire Systems is an Outsourced Product Development firm committed to helping our customers buildsoftware products better and faster. We work with some of the world’s most innovative IndependentSoftware Vendors and software-enabled businesses, ranging from start-ups to established industry leaders,transforming the way software is built.

Aspire provides complete product lifecycle services, ranging from new product development and productadvancement to product migration, re-engineering, sustenance and support. Our product development teamsare spread between our Global Innovation Center in Chennai, India and offices in the United States.

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Conclusion

IQA measures product quality at every stage of development life cycle and yields more defects at the early stages of product development, which results in overall improvement in the product quality. It also assists QA team to be an integral part of development that maximizes the test coverage and removes the risks in the release cycle. IQA emphasizes on 'building quality into the product' rather than ‘testing quality of the product'. It addresses the entire software development process, not just bug fixing at the end.

Aspire Systems India Private Limited

Plot No 1/D-1, SIPCOT IT PARK, Siruseri, Tamil Nadu - 603 103

Tel : +91-44-67404000. Fax: +91-44-67404234

E-mail : info@aspiresys.com

Web: www.aspiresys.com

Integrated Quality Approach– Building Quality into the Product