Making Quality a Core Value of Software Lifecycle Management

Lifecycle Quality Management is a pragmatic approach that is changing the way organizations think about software lifecycle management by enabling them to proactively address quality from the very beginning of the software delivery lifecycle.

Lifecycle Quality Management aligns business priorities and quality expectations with project requirements, development activities and software testing with a comprehensive solution for software quality assurance, management and control.

Quality itself is often hard to define because it means different things to different people, but in the context of software quality assurance, the simple and appropriate definition of software quality is the convergence of complete requirements, correct code, and minimal defects that align to meet business goals.

To employ Lifecycle Quality Management, then, means that requirements must align with business goals as well as testing objectives, development teams must be able to control the quality of emerging software builds and identify defects very early, and the quality assurance teams need to focus on testing what matters to the business and easily leverage the known efficiencies of test automation.

To meet these objectives, Borland Lifecycle Quality Management addresses the following key areas:

• Continuous Build and Test Automation
  Automated testing, integration, and validation for agile development
• Requirements-Based Testing
  Aligning business requirements with testing priorities
• Software Test Management
  Enabling a process-driven approach for planning, documenting and managing the entire testing process
• Software Performance Testing
  Load and stress testing of mission-critical application to identify and diagnose performance bottlenecks before going live
• Software Functional Testing
  Validating that application features and functionality meets end-user expectations and business requirements

Borland’s approach to quality is unique in that it takes into account an organization’s existing software lifecycle management maturity and leverages industry best practices to evaluate current performance and identify specific areas for improvement. The solution enables organizations to improve quality iteratively through:

Planning: Through proper planning, teams can ensure alignment between project and quality goals.

Verification & Validation: Through comprehensive verification and validation processes, including process audits, peer reviews, analysis & software testing; organizations can collect quality metrics all across the development lifecycle.

Management: Through change control, test analysis, status tracking, and reporting, organizations can control activities and assets driving quality initiatives, determine whether corrective actions are necessary, and inform management of on-demand status and readiness.

Improvement: Through metrics and criteria defined and analyzed during the quality process, development teams can respond to identified issues, whether they are process, requirements, or implementation related, eliminating or improving the root causes for follow-on development activities.

Effective Lifecycle Quality Management empowers software teams to:

Mitigate Risk

• Make informed, traceable, validated Go/No Go decisions
• Identify defects of all types earlier in the development phase and effectively across QA
• Know that performance and scalability are up to production standards
• Validate that users are receiving business value, as expected
• Understand the impact of business changes on development and test activities

Reduce Costs and Time to Market

• Eliminate defects in requirements – the highest source of software problems
• Capture defects on the developers desktop before Quality Assurance teams ever see them
• Reduce and eliminate broken builds that often bring Quality Assurance to a standstill
• Capitalize on the efficiency, accuracy and time-savings of test automation

Increase Efficiency, Profitability, Competitiveness

• Support manual and automated testing with process, efficiency and reporting
• Manage heterogeneous testing environments with a single quality platform
• Gain visibility into the testing process and project readiness
• Deliver applications faster than competitors
• Deliver applications with higher quality and better performance than competitors
• Meet business needs with confidence that functionality and performance meet user expectations
• Provide traceability to defects, requirements and tests for compliance needs