“We soon realized that testing the performance of the system was going to be critical in ensuring its effectiveness. We needed a partner who was going to give us an independent view and a fresh perspective. We assessed the merits of three different consultancies and AppLabs came out on top. The AppLabs team was very proactive from the outset and was deeply involved in the planning stages. They worked very closely with our internal IT team."
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Quality Assurance - Getting it Right in the First Place
Has my tester ‘tested’ the requirements?
The first thing about getting Quality Assurance right is getting it right in the first place – requirements gathering. It is not uncommon that inadvertently, defects get injected into software right from when the requirements are collected. Over the years it has also been proven that involving the Quality Assurance (QA) team in requirement reviews can detect and remove a high percentage of these defects, improving project efficiency and reducing costs.
Looking at it from another dimension it is only human that because test engineers will ultimately be charged with verifying the quality and completeness of the software before being cut into production for customer, they have a vested interest in good requirements.
Establishing consistent requirements reviews will result in business analysts and developers writing better requirements. Although development may be trending toward agile methods, this doesn't remove the need for requirements to be as precise as possible.
According to Gartner, “Finding and fixing defects during the development of the requirements is more than six times more cost-effective than doing so during the development phase”.
So one question you can ask before a requirement is passed into the design and implementation stage - Has my tester ‘tested’ the requirements?
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What Our Client Says
Steve Calvert, Project Manager, Carillion plc
