In our many years of experience developing software,
we have all recognized the benefits of good quality assurance
practices throughout the software development cycle.
Integrating these practices early and often in the schedule
will save countless hours of debugging, tweaking, and ultimately
stress during the launch of a product (a time when you can do
without any extra stress).
It is also our experience that testing efforts can suffer
on a project for a couple of reasons, lack of resources
usually being the culprit. For example, it’s often hard to
justify using a programmer’s valuable time to run regression
tests when you are in crunch time.
21-6 Productions is prepared to offer our experience and
expertise in assuring the quality of your software. Integrating
our QA services early in the development process is recommended
but we can also work with a completed product that just needs a thorough review.
Some of the QA services we can offer to your project include:
Development Methodology
It is our collective belief that a good object oriented
design developed iteratively throughout the development
cycle of a product is the key to assuring quality and
delivering the product on time. We can work with your
development team in a consulting capacity to review existing
designs or actually assist in the infrastructure design itself.
Test Plans
Writing and executing test plans at regular intervals in the
development cycle of your product will help to ensure the code
remains stable and functional requirements are met. These
test plans should optimally be written during the design phases
of your project after the requirements have been defined and
before development begins.
Stress Testing
When building a web site of any scale, our team has
found that establishing a stress testing environment
and running stress tests early and often almost always
results in a predictable and stable product at launch.
Understanding how stress affects your web site also helps
you estimate the kind of hardware and internet connection
your site will require. Our team has very specialized
expertise in this field gained during the development of two
high-volume, multi-tiered, web sites over the past two years.
Usability Testing
Your product may be a marvel of technology but is it
easy to use? That’s a difficult question to answer
yourself, especially if you are close to a product you
have designed or developed. Getting an outside opinion
from qualified professionals only helps to assure the
quality of your product and for very little cost. Our
team will review and report on many topics including how
intuitive the user interface is and whether all the product
features are approachable and easy to discover. We can
also provide recommendations for improvements if any are
required. Finally, we can extend these reviews to include
a small focus group of 10-12 participants if desired.
Test Tools
When writing custom software, it is often the case
that you need to write custom testing tools to help with
quality assurance. There are many “off the shelf tools”
that can assist the process but are usually not flexible
enough to run complex or feature-specific tests. Again,
it can be hard to justify spending your development resources
on test tools and it can be even harder to get developers to
write these tools. Our team can learn your product and
develop a testing utility that meets your specific needs
for very little cost or hassle.
