The Seapine View

One question I get every now and then is how to implement a test sequence in TestTrack TCM.  The concept of “before you test Y, you must test X first”.

There isn’t a specific feature in TestTrack to address this but there are actually several ways to implement test sequences. Following is one way.
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I am often asked a simple question that is anything but simple. “Which is better – manual testing or automated testing?” It’s impossible to answer without knowing what’s being tested. Everyone seems to want an easy answer so they can go to their boss and say, “If we only use ‘insert your favorite testing preference here’ testing then all will be well with our testing”. If it was that easy, there would only be one version of software, tested once and always working thereafter, with no revisions. Yeah right! Continue reading…

The prefix meta- is used to mean about its own category. For example, under the umbrella of business intelligence you often hear the term “metadata” which means data concerning data. For purposes of this short post, “metaquality” could be described as the process and operations through which quality assurance impacts the quality of the customer experience (quality concerning quality) through all phases of the customer lifecycle. Your customers generally move through a decision making process which opens the gate for multiple functional areas to have potential impact on the customer experience:

• Awareness and need identification
• Explore and qualify alternatives
• Solution discovery and evaluation
• Negotiation and purchase decision
• Implementation and post sales service
• After purchase acclimation and evaluation

At each strategic stage of the process, research & development, marketing, sales, services and finance will have various levels of influence on the quality of the overall customer experience; which means quality assurance during all phases of the customer lifecycle is critical. In the Seapine Software Quality-Ready Assessment we asked respondents: “What level of priority does your company currently assign to building quality into your software development environment?”  Nearly 65% of our over 900 respondents rated their software quality initiatives as high or one of their top priorities. However; it also appears that many companies are still not committed to quality improvement.  In other words, they are only paying lip service about quality, and as a result there is a discrepancy with how their customers view the relationship.  Consider the following statistics from the Cutter Consortium, an IT advisory firm.

• 32% of organizations say they release software with too many defects.
• 38% of organizations believe they lack an adequate software quality assurance program.
• 27% of organizations do not conduct any formal quality reviews.

The current combination of declining customer satisfaction levels and economic concerns is creating the perfect customer experience storm.  In this type of business climate those companies that focus on quality will be the ones that come out on top. That means a relentless and coordinated approach to quality improvement across all functional areas has never been more important.

In Search of Failure.  That’s the title of chapter seven in Frederick Reichheld’s book “The Loyalty Effect” (©1996).  In that chapter Reichheld points out that an investor who built a stock portfolio out of the companies profiled in the book “In Search of Excellence” (Peters and Waterman ©1982) would have seen their returns trounced by the mediocre performance of the S&P index during the ten year period following the books 1982 publication.  In fact, by time Reichheld’s book came out in 1996 only one-fifth of the original companies profiled as “excellent” had remained excellent.

If success breeds success, how in the “quest for benchmarking best practices” did those companies lose their lofty status?  In Reichheld’s opinion what really helps us to achieve excellence is actually the study of failure.  It’s not exactly in our nature to seek out failure though; in fact, your career is probably linked to success, which means that getting too close to failure may feel threatening.  However, most people will admit that mistakes are often better teachers than success.  In fact, QA experts will attest that when one component fails, it can cast a spotlight on the workings of an entire program.

The analysis of failure is not that easy; but when the analysis leads to sustained quality the pay-off is big.  In the Profit Impact of Marketing Strategy (PIMS) project the researchers (Buzzell and Gale, 1987) reported that the profitability of a business is affected by 37 basic factors. Based on analysis of information available in the PIMS database, Buzzell and Gale hypothesized that in the long run, the most important single factor affecting a business unit’s performance is the quality of its products and services relative to those of competitors.

The trick is to set up a process and system to track, test, analyze, and address potential issues, defects or problems before they negatively impact profitability.  In many ways quality and value are interlocked.  Customer value proposition models are based on the idea that customers with different needs require different experiences and different value propositions if the relationship between the customer and company is to be mutually beneficial.  And no value proposition will succeed in delivering profit to a company unless the customer perceives the product (or service) as meeting their needs best.