Insight takes top award at EuroSTAR 2006!
Declan Kavanagh, Insight's managing director, took the top award for the Best Paper at EuroSTAR 2006.
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EuroSTAR 2006 is Europe's premier event for software quality assurance and test professionals and took place over 4 days in Manchester from Dec 4 to 7.
A video of the presentation is available here.
A copy of Declan's PowerPoint presentation is available from the Presentations section of the Resources/Downloads menu of this website. An associated white paper can be viewed in our White Paper section.
The paper suggests that running your test organisation like your own business, with best practice business principles significantly improves the performance of test and the visibility of its contribution in the organisation. Often test and QA managers operate within the business with little influence or perceived influence. They get their mandate from other parts of the business and have to respond after decisions have been made on projects, budgets, resources and requirements. The reality is that software test and QA have a lot to offer the business with bottom line financial benefits. Rather than negotiating after the fact and being seen as the bottle neck to a release take control of your business make it proactive and transparent. Identify where you want to make a real impact such as the following examples:
- Reducing support costs
- Enhancing quality at source in design and development
- Enhancing the user experience
- Reducing the total cost of supply
Some common challenges for the Test Manager
- Test seen as an overhead and not adding value
- Test is a subset of Development or a project
- Justification for investment can be difficult
- Test resources not equated in value with other non test technical resources.
The suggested approach is to manage test as if it was your own business. So what does this mean?
Test as a business:
Define, segment and size the market opportunity:
- Geographically - where in the organisation or value chain
- Life Cycle - Requirements to end user delivery
- Vertically - Business units, divisions, parent, subsidiary
- Niche - Specialise
Define and document the offerings and make sure the value proposition is understood.
- What is the problem/opportunity you are addressing is it high defect counts, or late payments by clients/users.
- Define and size the consequences of not addressing ( cycle times, schedule adherence, rework costs, staff morale etc)
- Define the solution and deliverables.
- List the benefits quantitative and qualitative
Understand the competition and your competitive advantage. In your organisation some likely sources of competition are:
- Spend on resources other than test
- Do Test in a lower cost location
- In or outsource
- Do at another facility
- Do nothing
- Have Developers, Support, Business do test
Complete a core competence analysis; identify strengths and gaps to be filled so the market can be addressed. Identify the skills needed to deliver real value.
Prepare a business plan. Vision, Mission, Goals, Values, Strategies, Plans, Markets, Sales, Delivery, Resources, Financials
Prepare an operational plan. How will you deliver excellent services, Methodology, Resources, Training, Metrics, Reports, Communications, exception handling, Scope and Change Control?
Create a commercial or pseudo commercial process. Position your organisation to bid for work, make formal proposals, negotiate, put in place structured service level agreements, and put in place bonus and penalty incentives.
Create a business case template. So investment decisions can be made with all the facts and clear ROI. Key Points: 1. Its not complicated to move from managing a department or function to managing a mini business. 2. Putting these processes in place really demonstrates the value of test and motivates the organisation to improve software quality. 3. Investment in software quality and testing becomes more transparent.
Software quality and qualityqualityqualityqualityqualitytestingg services provider UK and Ireland Insight Test Services, with offices in the UK and Ireland, is one of Europe largest full-service suppliers of specialist software quality assurance and test services.