A High Price Doesn’t Always Mean High Quality
Make it work both ways
Do you feel safer driving a Volvo? More creative using an Apple laptop? The power of the brand makes you feel you are. But are you really safer or more creative for that matter? This works quite the same way with ITO brands such as Tatva, Wipro, you name it: you might feel like the smartest outsourcer, but are you? Or is that just the charm of the brand working on you?
Actually, buyers of outsourcing services largely define the quality of the outsourced product by the very nature of their organization. If they don’t run their processes ad hoc, have a robust outsourcing management & governance framework and strive for transparent, long-term partnership, they are able to get top quality services from even the smallest ITO vendor.
However, internal readiness alone doesn’t guarantee high quality of the delivered service.
If an organization has decided to outsource to a small ITO provider offshore, it must first assess how the vendor manages software quality. Whatever offshore partner you choose, we encourage you to look for a robust quality management framework on the vendor’s side.
A Common Approach to Software Quality
While many IT outfits say they practice “a continuous approach to quality, initiated early in the software lifecycle”, we believe that the major drawback of small IT vendors’ software Quality Assurance (QA) is that the process is often focused on ensuring what might be called a generic quality of a software product.
For instance, often quality goals are based on sheer assumptions about the levels of reliability expected in business software systems vs. mass market solutions. This clearly leads to inconsistent QA practices because each software product has a unique set of quality requirements. So why don’t vendors ask their clients about this?
The answer is – it is impossible to gather and quantify clients’ expectations and then set up manageable and measurable quality goals if basic QA activities are not backed up by a solid framework.
Look Beyond Quality Assurance
We believe that testing and Quality Assurance activities should be planned and assessed rigorously within a framework. (Figure 1.)
Thus, the first step in any software development project should be setting up clear internal goals based on external quality expectations. While the goals may change in the process (especially if the development is iterative) it is vital to have initial quality goals in place at the start of any project
After the your expectations have been collected and translated into concrete internal goals, the QA team selects the appropriate Quality Assurance activities as well as software tools to achieve these goals. Also, it is essential to decide what quality measurements and models will be used. Again the range of measurement and monitoring tools depends on what quality goals must be achieved.
During the quality planning phase, the software development provider and its client make strategic decisions regarding the level of fault-tolerance expected and discuss how extensive QA may affect speed-to-market. At this stage, the QA team must decide what QA techniques will be used further along in the process and whether or not activities will be focused on specific quality attributes like usability or reliability.
During the execution phase, the QA team performs planned activities using selected tools and methods. In the process of software development, engineers, programmers, testers and project managers generate a lot of potentially useful data. It is a healthy practice to collect this data and analyze it. Therefore, the QA process should be constantly monitored with the appropriate assessment techniques.
All the information gathered within Quality Management Framework could be then analyzed by both parties. The resulting knowledge will help you and your offshore vendor make the right decisions regarding software quality in future projects.
