5 Key Reasons To On-board A Test Advisory & Transformation Partner

By Author: Michael Wade
Total Articles: 67
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Businesses across the globe have been dealing with challenges related to market recession, capital crunch, frequent technological advances, increase in customer expectations, and quicker time-to-market. The best way to meet these challenges is to upgrade the IT infrastructure on the lines of Agile and Lean principles. Besides, quality as an important attribute in the overall SDLC or manufacturing life cycle is needed to be acknowledged, and suitably customised to meet a company’s business goals.

Test Advisory Services are independent bodies of experts that assess the maturity of the QA function in a company, and suggest or implement measures to make it nimble, effective, technically compliant, responsive, and world class. The role of Transformation testing experts is to assess and implement measures that ensure that the testing processes of an organisation remain capable of testing multiple vendor inputs and cloud based resources, run virtualization, and confirm that final deliverables meet business specifications and objectives.

The ever expanding demands of businesses have brought Quality Assurance to the ...
... centre stage. Of late, business stakeholders have realized the importance of quality and how it can have a bearing on the spread of their customer base and brand equity in the market. As business dynamics change rapidly in the wake of technological advancements and other global factors, the need to reorient one’s Quality Assurance processes assumes salience.

Furthermore, a significant number of organizations are yet to embrace the latest testing technologies, and the ones they are saddled with (read legacy QA systems) do not do justice to the customers’ need for world class quality products or services.

Such scenarios require an independent assessment of the existing QA systems present in companies by Test Advisory Consultants - independent third party experts, who have their eyes and ears tuned to the latest QA technologies and customer preferences. The assessment by Test Advisory Services (TAS) is critical, as it can pave the way for transforming legacy QA systems to the ones that are truly world class.

However, before embarking on this exercise it is important to choose the right group of Transformation testing experts, for any wrong choice can have a devastating impact on the overall business of a company.

The five key reasons to consider before embracing new Test Advisory Services are as follows:

Impact of transformation: The TAS should be able to assess the maturity of existing QA systems and apprise business stakeholders beforehand through lead indicators about any negative impact of the proposed transformation on business. This will provide proper perspective to the management to determine if it is worthwhile for the entire QA function to be overhauled or just a select few modules of that function.

Relevant to business: The QA transformation model put forth by Test Advisory Consultants should be business specific, and not generic. The model should be flexible enough to accommodate different requirements within an organisation. For example, a module dependent on products / services sourced from third party vendors should have a different yardstick for testing than say, a module that is self sufficient.

Detailed analysis: A comprehensive analysis by the Transformation testing experts should encompass mechanism to assess the maturity of QA processes of an organisation. This analysis by the TAS team should highlight areas where improvements are needed and where robust systems are already in place. This would help in determining the cost factor related to transformation.

Micro and macro changes: TAS should list out changes to be done at the micro and macro levels of the QA function. This is important, as each level of change would require reskilling of the testing personnel, and suitably gauge the time factor for transformation.

Impact on ROI: The Test Advisory Consultants should put in place a metrics based evaluation system that should calculate the cost of QA transformation and show how it would impact the overall Return of Investment (ROI.)