Back to blogging

It's been awhile since I last blogged however my passion in my absence for Quality Assurance has not diminished; it's alive, excited and ready to go. I'd like to share with you my experiences and research on ways the QA Team can help change the success rate of IT projects. How we need to change the perception of the QA team, get involved sooner in projects, help our mates find more bugs earlier, change the concept of what’s tested and when, become "test developer's" (I'll explain that one later), automate our testing correctly, take advantage of developer unit testing, and last but not least what can VSTS Edition for Testers do for you, the team and the project.

So they say only 34% of IT projects are successful, yep out of 100 IT Projects 66 are not successful. What makes a project successful, completed on schedule, all valid requirements are meant, within budgets, testing has been done, etc… Why are projects not successful, we believe there are four major factors, one around requirements, the next around scope and the third involves bad estimates and four not testing early enough in the project. Requirements are poorly recorded, misinterpreted, missed completely, invalidate, not validated, and not visible to everyone. The business user’s are not involved after passing over their needs. Scope gets pushed out but time-lines don’t how many times has someone promised some new functionality or expanded functionality that was not part of the original requirements. Estimates, how long do you need to complete a task, we are not good at this either you see under estimating or over estimating. Being in QA which is the end of the line, these bad estimations of time affect our team most. Last testing to late or not early enough, bugs are cheapest to fix early in the project, as are requirements that are misinterpreted, not valid or causing scope creeping. The earlier testing is started the better chance of project success. So how do we address these four issues, better still how do we work towards increasing that 34% success rate to a higher number?

Over the next while I will blog on each of these issues, incorporating them into not only VSTS as the integrated tool that helps us manage our projects, our requirements, our time-lines, our tasks and help us to succeed. Whether you use VSTS or some other tools the concepts are the same so stay tuned for tomorrows blog "Starting Early - who, how, what, when and why.

See you tomorrow ... Testa