The Approach (Part3)

The day to day activities and the existing scenarios and processes have to be studied and  the  list of observations across the teams development, QA, product, technical support and customer support teams should be plotted down.

Also, the team members experience and skill set should be discussed and a set of best practices and processes should be enumerated and a feasibility analysis should made.

The collected data needs to be analyzed and bounced in sessions of brain storming and later compared them with the collected set of heuristics.

As long as the team is involved in the change,  and their concerns are addressed with their solutions, the team will eagerly switch over to the new processes and their motivation level will be high, brimming with ideas.

Action Items

As per the metrics that are collected to identify the problem areas, the changes should be implemented in a phased out manner

Analysis of the collected metrics could be done by the following actions (the list is not all inclusive)

§  Measurable metrics like

-      Defect Finding Rate

-      Defect Fixing Rate

-      Defect distribution across components

-      Defect cause distribution chart

-      Closed defect distribution

-      Code coverage

-      Number of testcases executed to find number of critical or major defects

-      Defects found outside of the testcases etc., 

§  Evaluate the present methods and procedures to identify these metrics or to fetch new ones with new processes to improve the quality quotient of efficiency

§  Consult any Standards, as per the organization's need for certification like TMM (I) etc,(if required)  the processes need to be inline with those standards

§  Collect a set of heuristics from various members based on their inputs, a feasibility analysis for processes of best fit should be arrived and a baseline should be declared.  Speak to consultants and people from similar industry, books, articles and research materials to pitch in for the areas where more expertise is required.

Checklists

When the processes are in put in place, a check process is required and the following are the list of checklists that can be deployed to carry out the validation and track the progress of the changes that are to be deployed.

§  The present state to be recorded as a snapshot to compare against the results post the processes change implementations

§  The awareness of the new changes to be introduced to the team with the help of many sessions, documents and discussions

§  Checklists, review points etc to be put in place to ensure it is being following by all the members.

§  Common board for the members to state any improvements or suggestions to fine tune the baseline set

§  Once the initialization is done, the status is to be updated by the members along with any difficulties and suggestions

§  The progress to be tracked through various status details, charts and graphs

§  Feedback or survey mechanisms to be in place to measure the value add that resulted out of this exercise and keep the processes up to date

§  The outcome to be reviewed periodically and the changes should be proposed to get implemented and the cycle to continue till the processes reach end of life

§  Postmortem or root-cause analysis to be done at the end of every project

§  Assign owners to each task to monitor the progress at the micro level and the end report to be consolidated to review the outcomes