Friday, May 17, 2013

Software Quality Management via Test Process Improvement

Ever since the software engineering discipline was born, there is lot of investment to address software quality related issues. The software quality is becoming a continuously challenging as complexity of software and the software solution users expectations are going up significantly. People looked at solution for software quality issue by addressing the software development process looking at standard for process improvements like ISO 9001 and CMMI. The TMMi framework has been developed by the TMMi Foundation as a guideline and reference framework for test process improvement and is positioned as a complimentary model to the CMMI version 1.2 addressing those issues important to test engineering community.

From my experience many projects will budget 30-40% of total cost of project to testing but we always land up in spending more in many cases due to late stage detection of defects or insufficient testing leading to defect escape to field and so on. It is important to look at controlling this software testing budget overflow by focusing on "Effectiveness and Efficiency" factor for all testing efforts in the entire software development life cycle.

I feel by looking at TMMi framework one can find the gaps in people competency to perform a specific role, process over heads in end-to-end software development life cycle, and gaps in usage of right set of tools  which helps to increase efficiency, accuracy and sufficiency factor of testing in this business driven challenging situations. Thought will share the practical application of process driven approach to increase effectiveness and efficiency of testing using TMMi in series of postings. 

Is there a crude way to know where we are currently in test process maturity in your organization? Take a look at these slides.  
http://slidesha. re/MCN-Quick-TP-Assess

TMMi is a registered trademark of TMMi Foundation.
TMMi Foundations makes no warranties of any kind who prefer to use this framework for test process improvement

Appreciate readers views and comments.

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