Are you getting the best out of your QA department?
In the 2021 State of Software Quality study by EMA and Micro Focus, 70% of companies interviewed stated that application development had a significant impact on revenue generation, with 71% indicating that the quality of their software products had a high, very high or extremely high impact on revenue generation.
Software testing methodologies and system operation philosophies change relatively quickly, as they must, in order to keep up with changing development processes. However, testing divisions can sometimes be slower to change. This is not a shortcoming on the part of the people involved – it is more a case of a testing team’s inherent inability to evaluate their own position. Simply put, it’s difficult for testers to test themselves.
An organisation’s test processes, systems and teams thus require an independent assessment to identify risks and inefficiencies and define a path to improvement containing actionable steps. This allows the testing divisions and the organisation as a whole to achieve a higher level of testing maturity.
Enter the TPI (Test Process Improvement Assessment)
The TPI is an independent and objective assessment of an organisation’s testing maturity, benchmarked against the internationally accepted TPI model. The service has been revised and adapted to make provision for testing to include DevOps and other Agile approaches.
There are two internationally accepted testing assessment process types: TMMI (testing maturity modelling integration) and TPI. The TMMI model is complex to implement, and requires specifically certified people, making it very costly. It’s also a long process, typically taking twelve months to get approval of the assessment.
The TPI process on the other hand is far shorter and more efficient. Often completed within a month, the process is also highly flexible and can be implemented organisation-wide or at an individual project level to look at specific test processes. It costs a lot less and can be done very quickly, giving a highly optimised view of how testing is being implemented across your organisation.
At iOCO we don’t merely apply this framework as an out-of-the-box solution. We customise it to your specific organisation. This enables you to:
- Understand your current maturity
- Start addressing improvements / shortcomings
- Have an individualised road map to guide you
- Help everyone in your organisation understand how QA fits into the overall digital transformation process
In addition to creating an individualised road map towards testing maturity, we also assist in creating a QA target operating model (TOM) for the testing services and management across your entire organisation.
iOCO is committed to providing actionable outputs/deliverables:
- The analysis will provide key action points for your clients to address
- The focus will be on low-hanging fruit to show value-add quickly
- The outcomes will enable you to implement the recommendations with or without the assistance of iOCO
- Our aim is to show tangible progress in smaller deliverables
By Beavin De Kock
iOCO Cluster Executive
