Project Quality Assurance

Project success is dependent on meeting defined schedule, cost and product functionality and quality expectations. The client basically has a right to have a "deliver what I paid for attitude". The Heinsights Project Quality Assurance service is designed to ensure a project "delivers the goods" the client is asking for. As the name implies, this service is primarily focused to ensure a quality product is delivered to the client - where quality is defined (and agreed upon) in quantifiable terms at the very onset, when the project is planned.

This service is based on the premise that there are three success factors for every software development project - (1) the product is produced on time and (2) within cost and (3) quality constraints. Cost and schedule constraints have historically been used to measure project progress and success; they are components that we routinely try to quantify. Quality is difficult for most customers to define; they only know when it is missing. Therefore, even though quality is one of the critical project success factors, quality constraints are usually not explicitly defined at the beginning of a project. Because they are implicit, they are often not addressed until it is obvious to the customer (usually just before product delivery) that the product has quality problems. If product quality constraints are not addressed, or addressed late in the project (causing cost and schedule overruns), projects are labeled unsuccessful.

Our quality assurance services help a project to succeed by balancing quality, cost and schedule factors. We help projects to (1) define quality constraints early in a project, (2) define, schedule and cost the quality assurance activities to be included in the project plan, and (3) assure these activities are executed to build quality into the delivered product. Please refer to the Software Quality Assurance page for a Heinsights perspective on software quality and quality assurance.

Heinsights Project Quality Assurance Services are:

· Project Quality Assurance Management – helping you plan and manage all project quality assurance activities. We will use the Verification and Validation (V&V) process described above or use your own project QA practices.

· Project Quality Assurance Resourcing – helping you define project QA resource needs and staffing your project with the right people. We will provide you with a QA manager, reviewers/inspectors, testers, test tool implementers, metrics and test administrators (defect trackers & reporters), Systems Configuration Management (SCM) team members, etc. Depending on the size and complexity of your project and availability of our staff, some of the skills required on your QA team may be combined in key individuals. Based on availability of your own QA staff, we can also provide mentors for your staff in these skill areas.

· Project Quality Assurance Best Practices – helping you assess your current project quality assurance practices and design and implement new QA practices based on a combination of your own and industry best practices (drawing on IEEE software engineering and QA standards and other sources). The end result will be a best practices library tailored for your organization and culture and reusable for all of your projects. The library will contain the processes, templates, and tool linkages necessary for you to plan, execute, and close out all of your project QA efforts. We will help you transition your staff to these new practices by providing the training and mentoring you need.

· Quality Assurance Training – helping you assess your QA training needs and implement the best fit mentoring and training curriculum for your team. Training can be made available for all of the QA methods and tools in your best practices library. Additional QA training may include the following types of courses (and more):

o Software and system testing

o Test planning

o Web, component (object oriented), and user acceptance testing

o Requirements driven testing

o Testing automation and testing tools

o Software quality assurance

o Software configuration management

o Software QA methods, including inspections

o Facilitation

Please see the IT Education & Mentoring web page for course details.


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