Health Checks that can determine the effectiveness and
benefit of  current  business  practices / applications. We
offer audits and assessments to examine the health of a
project. From this we can: 

The following key areas, essential to effective QA in any organisation, are reviewed in a typical healthcheck;

1. Any methods / processes currently in place for QA
2. All relevant Documentation and Reporting in place
3. Issue Logging / Defect Tracking and Fixing procedures
4. Current tools used (Defect Tracking etc.) where they are used, their implementation, methods of use, maintenance and current commercial / licence issues
5. Current Testing Practice - Unit testing, System testing and regression testing as a part of the development lifecycle
6. Test / Release Frequency Testing Environments - their use, maintenance and support
7. Reporting between and within departments including structure, reporting and staffing across all aspects of testing
8. TPI (Test Process Improvement) Maturity Level and recommended next steps.

If there are areas of the development lifecycle of particular concern, then the scope of the health check can be focussed on them, in order to provide the maximum benefit in the time available.

Test Process Improvement (TPI)

During health checks, the current state of the test process can be assessed using the TPI Process.

The TPI model is used to analyse the current situation of a test process and to identify its strong and weak aspects. For this, it is necessary that the model looks at the test process from different points of view e.g. the use of tools, test specification techniques and reporting. These are known as key areas.

The examination of each of the identified key areas leads to the classification of the test process into certain levels of maturity. The ascending levels improve in terms of time (faster), money (cheaper) and / or quality (better). Because all areas and levels are not equally important for the performance of the complete test process and because dependencies exist between the different key areas and levels, all key areas and levels are mutually linked in a Test Maturity matrix.

The Test Maturity Matrix identifies all the areas that relate to the test process and scores them against pre-determined criteria. The main advantage of this process is that the areas to focus on next can be identified as the areas that will provide the maximum benefit to the overall maturity of the test process. This means that effort and resources can be targeted on the areas that will make the most difference to the organisation, so that maximum efficiency can be obtained. Additionally, our clients can be assured that the maturity of their test function is being measured against industry standard metrics.

Health Check Process 

Kick Off Meeting 
Meeting with the e-testing Principal Consultant and the Project Sponsor to review:

1. A summary of the scope of the Health Check, milestones and timetable.
2. Setting a framework for the Interviews and review of processes

MEETING PLAN AND SCHEDULE
Scheduling meetings between e-testing and several functional areas of the client team. The following functions will typically be interviewed:

1. Testing managers
2. Development managers
3. Top level management
4. Product managers
5. Project managers
6. QA managers.

Expected number of interviews required: 5 to 15

INFORMATION COLLECTION
Information collection will be performed as follows:

1. Interviews
2. Review of workflow procedures
3. Current documents and deliverables review - samples
4. Review and evaluation of QA and testing tools - samples

PRIORITISATION OF FINDINGS
The objective of this stage is to:

1. Identify "early" wins
2. Prioritise "key" wins, which will maximise the benefit.
3. Avoid wasting time and money on low risk, low value or unimportant improvements

FINAL REPORT, RESULTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS PRESENTATION
Presentation of the final report by e-testing that highlights the current situation, goals, and a gap analysis between them.