Is your client having difficulty to measure QA performance? Is your client undecided on what test strategy to follow for new application implementation? Is your client looking for testing tool recommendations or need to improve the usage of the existing ones?
Hexaware has a dedicated Test Consulting practice where testing experts are involved in providing test consulting services to clients. During the consulting engagements, Hexaware assesses and evaluates the Approach, People and Technology and fill in the gaps by bringing in our domain experience, best practices, frameworks, tools experience, etc. The consulting services also include tools selection, tools optimization and TCoE Creation and/or optimization.
If you want to learn more about test strategy, the next information will help you to execute a test strategy engagement.
Test Strategy Approach
The first step is to identify the problem(s) that the client is facing and define the strategy objectives. After that, I recommend to follow this approach to execute a test strategy project:
Assessment Areas
As part of the information gathering phase, we leverage its proprietary ATPTM (Approach, People, and Technology) methodology to focus on the right areas and meet the strategy objectives. Hexaware’s APT™ Methodology is the foundation of all of our QA service offerings, below is the description of each component:
• The Approach component is designed to lay the foundation for the processes that each client use as part of testing
• People is the component of the IT organization with focus on testing, Hexaware analyze the groups, roles and responsibilities involved in QA and testing
• The Technology component includes the use of QA and automation testing tools for efficiency to optimize technology and lower costs.
At the end of the project, we provide to the client the following component:
•Current State: An analysis of the current state with regard to the testing objectives
•Gaps: The gaps found between the current state and the best practices and the desired state
•Recommendations: Our recommendations to close the gaps and meet the organization objectives
•Implementation Road Map: A recommended path to follow in order to implement the recommendations.
As a result of the analysis phase, we show to our clients the current state in a quantitative graph. This graph evaluates all relevant aspects of an IT organization and prioritizes each category according to the testing objectives. One example of this graph is showed below.
This was an assessment provided as part of a test strategy we created for a leading bank in Mexico for a T24 product implementation. The benefits showed in this strategy was to reduce testing cycles by 30%, automate at least 50% of the manual test cases and have a defect free implementation using robust and repeatable testing processes.
Other examples of metrics commonly used as part of the strategy objectives are the increment of automation coverage by 30%, increase productivity by 25%, reduce overall testing cost by 15%, etc.
A test consulting practice is an area full of innovation, industry best practices and shared experiences. Now with Hexaware blogs all of us will be able to formally share our experience and our colleagues can leverage them for future assignments.
