QA Team Revitalization

The Challenge:

A software company struggling to overcome poor customer satisfaction, low QA team morale, and degrading cross-functional communication and teamwork must revitalize its QA team.

The company’s lack of visibility into test coverage is causing numerous post-release quality issues, an increase in Tech Support calls, and several unanticipated maintenance projects. This is consuming development team resources and bogging down new software development schedules. As a result, confidence in the QA team is waning throughout the company, and is limiting the leader’s ability to recover momentum and morale organically.

The QA leader is under immense pressure from executive management to improve quality immediately in order to retain unhappy customers; but the QA leader is without the time, resources and know-how to do so successfully while meeting the demands of an accelerated development cycle.

The Solution:

Shasta QA provides the leadership, proven methodologies, and outsourced testing services required to immediately improve quality, bring new software projects back on schedule, and reinvigorate the QA team.

The Keys to Success:

Shasta QA and the company develop the testing strategy, action plan, progress metrics and resource requirements. Together, they prioritize the highest risk software components for testing and identify test blockers that could impede progress. Then Shasta QA generates test cases and a test coverage map.

Shasta QA becomes an extension of the company’s QA team. By augmenting existing testing resources, Shasta QA boosts the productivity of the company’s QA team.

Shasta QA leads an analysis of the company’s software development process, project management, and Quality Assurance methodologies to identify the root causes of software quality issues and create a detailed quality improvement plan.

The Result:

By defining a testing strategy and action plan, the QA team:

• Resolves immediate quality issues that cause the most pain to customers
• Identifies other potential issues before they become pain points
• Increases the productivity of the QA team by identifying blockers early, understanding test coverage, and focusing test efforts on the highest risk components first

By utilizing Shasta QA’s testing services to execute the action plan, the QA team:

• Achieves some quick wins to boost morale
• Obtains immediate visibility into software quality
• Relieves the company’s development team from its role as a “part time” QA resource
• Enables the development team to rapidly fix software bugs and release new software on schedule

By developing a quality improvement plan and sharing it with customers and executive management, the QA team:

• Retains its customers and demonstrates its long term commitment to quality improvement
• Implements proven QA methodologies and cross-functional metrics to continuously improve software quality
• Streamlines the software development process
• Increases its productivity and that of the development team
• Breaks down “silos’ impeding cross-functional communication and teamwork
• Begins rebuilding credibility with customers, colleagues and executive management