Whatever the size of your organisation, taking a structured approach to developing quality software products will have a direct effect on your credibility within your marketplace. Whether you are a small business looking to announce your existence on the internet, or you wish to provide a more complicated, online service understanding your key users and ensuring that your service meets their needs is essential.
A quality product is one that delivers the service your clients require, in a manner that is efficient and effective. Software is developed to make our everyday work simpler and quicker, anything else is over-engineering and will only remove profit from your bottom line. The object is to get noticed in your marketplace, ensure that your clients stay engaged with your service and they can conduct their business quicker using your software than they would using another method. Sounds simple, it should be...
Lay your foundations for your project. As a business owner you know more about what happens in your company and your market place than the developers you get to build your software. You know how your clients interact with your business, where there are issues that need ironing out and how you would like to develop your business. Ensure that you are engaged with your softwares' development from inception to completion and strategise how best to deliver successfully to market.
Aim to deliver what your clients or users want, avoid over engineering keep it simple, lean and efficient. Understand your business growth, your plans for the future and how your software will deliver efficiencies. Make sure you deliver within time, within budget and within a framework that can be adapted in the future. Ensure this scope is defined and documented.
Build a good test strategy to compliment your immediate and future scope, ensuring that key data on issues like peak software usage, operating system/browser popularity, portability, security, timelines and accessibility are detailed. Your planning and test documentation will flow from your strategy.
Understand what your software can and cannot do within scope. By detailing 'conditions' under which the software successfully undertakes its requirements you can determine its suitability for live usage. Map out and follow a test script, as this will enable you to see how the test was completed, ensure that all issues found that are 'within scope' are rectified and all that are out of scope are enhanced later. Maintain a full audit trail of activities agreed within the scope, and you have proof of compliance.
I have had experience, building and maintaining corporate test strategies. Developing phased plans for releases, managing test environments and developing documentation to enhance test execution. Feel free to contact me if you would like any help with developing your test portfolio.
After ensuring that your software is within scope and successfully delivers its requirements, it is advantageous to offer a select group of users access to the software to offer their opinions. This is usually undertaken when the software is complete and stable and highlight future enhancements, unusual user behaviour and usability issues not spotted during testing.