Part IV: Appendices


Quality Assurance Is the Key

An independent and objective quality assurance (QA) department is the key to implementing and institutionalizing change management and process improvement. By independent and objective, we mean that the people performing the QA activities are not under undue influence to just let things slide. They also have a reporting chain that is separate from the managers and individuals whose work they are reviewing. Job performance and evaluation of QA personnel should also be independent of individuals associated with the work being reviewed.

This battle for establishing a separate QA office is one of our most frequent. Organizations simply do not want to budget for staff that does not directly contribute to building the product. Smaller organizations have difficulty budgeting for this duty, and those organizations that cannot shift the cost onto the customer also stall this effort. Some organizations decide that they will have the programmers from one team perform QA reviews on the work of programmers from another team. While this sounds OK at first, it often does not work out that way. Why not? Because people start making deals: "If you pass my stuff, I'll pass yours." Also, most of these people have not been trained in QA, do not understand what QA is really about, and do not realize the importance of QA activities. They would rather be programming, building, or testing things.

Let us talk about human nature. Most of us try to do a good job. But, when we know that someone will be looking at and reviewing what we do, and how we do it, we tend to pay a little more attention to the details, and maybe try a little bit harder to make sure everything works right. QA also enforces following procedures, and notifies the process group and management when the procedures do not work. Most organizations are under a lot of schedule pressure. Schedule often gets attention because it is easy to see; that is, the date is here and the product did not ship. Quality is more difficult to see.

Another advantage of having independent, objective QA staff is when things go wrong, or are about to go wrong. If your procedures say that the product cannot be delivered until certain defects have been fixed, and the tests show that these defects have not been fixed, QA can step in and notify/argue with senior management and delay shipment. If shipment is not delayed, QA can at least make sure that senior management signs off on the shipment with the understanding of all the defects and their ramifications . So, when customers receive products that do not work as expected, finger-pointing back to the "worker bees" can be reduced. (There are reasons why shipping a defective product may be a good idea and a wise executive decision, but we do not go into that here.)

In previous chapters, we discussed metrics and data collection. QA is a great place to report metrics that measure how things are working or not working in the projects, and then have QA report their findings to management. So, if one project manager tells senior management that this project is "on track," QA can dispute that by showing the milestones missed and expected project delays. QA can also report the metrics that track the results of peer reviews and testing that demonstrate the quality of the product (or lack thereof). The metrics collected as part of the normal QA activities cited in the Product and Process Assurance process area of the CMMI can be used to accurately measure progress and quality, and should be reported as part of management reviews.

A last point on QA. You need to staff QA with enough qualified people to get the work done. We have seen a lot of organizations that go through the motions and create a QA group out of the people that "can't do real work." And of course this approach fails. QA needs to be staffed by professionals that will be respected across the organization for their contributions. And the QA staff needs to be large enough to do the work. For most organizations, we recommend at least 5 percent of the development and maintenance budget be allocated to QA staffing and activities.




Interpreting the CMMI(c) A Process Improvement Approach
Interpreting the CMMI (R): A Process Improvement Approach, Second Edition
ISBN: 142006052X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 205

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