QA Consulting Services for a Multinational Automotive Software Company
Customer
The Customer is a multinational company providing software solutions for the international car retail industry. The company supports more than 4,000 dealers of such car manufacturers as BMW, Volvo, and Volkswagen Group.
Challenge
The Customer started to work on development of a multifunctional CRM for car manufacturers, their dealers, and importing companies. Initially, the Customer wanted QA processes to be managed by their project’s team. However, the process proved to be inefficient due to the lack of in-house QA professionals. The company decided to engage an experienced QA consulting provider at an early Software Development stage. The Customer commissioned ScienceSoft to set up a QA project strategy with tuned processes from scratch and then provide relevant software testing services.
Solution
ScienceSoft’s QA consultant started with examining the state of the Customer’s project processes and the current QA level. During the visit to the customer’s office, the dedicated consultant gathered the information on the Customer’s business strategy and high-level requirements for the project and got acquainted with the available project documentation. Next, he held ad hoc interviews with the PM, the developers, and other stakeholders. On the basis of the received data, the QA consultant prepared a quality report. According to the report, the Customer’s QA processes maturity was estimated at level one according to the TMMi (Test Maturity Model Integration). Following the results of the report, ScienceSoft’s QA consultant developed a comprehensive plan for QA processes recovery.
The first action point of the plan was improving the Customer’s team awareness of the basic QA role in the project’s SDLC and the whole business strategy.
For that, meetings were arranged with the development staff. During these meetings, ScienceSoft’s QA consultant highlighted the flaws in the existing code, which were caused by development team’s neglecting such coding QA aspects as code readability, testability, robustness and regular code reviews. Our consultant strongly recommended the developers not to disregard them in order to quickly maintain and extend the code, and also for it to be easier to test.
Secondly, to tune the QA processes, the dedicated consultant helped the PM to create a thorough multilevel project requirements structure in Microsoft Team Foundation Server. The QA consultant suggested using and provided assistance with the Microsoft Test Manager tool to ensure the PM’s and developers’ understanding of the testing team’s progress. He arranged training sessions for the stakeholders to mould the design and functionality requirements, and ensure development and testing collaboration with the help of conventional Microsoft tools.
Thirdly, ScienceSoft’s consultant developed a profound QA strategy. The strategy was based on the stakeholders’ requirements for a convenient CRM with role-tailored workflows and specific functions, diverse product categories and vehicle configurations. It comprised the planned testing types, test team members and their responsibilities, environment requirements and needed tools, test schedule and priorities.
Additionally, ScienceSoft’s team of 3 to 10 testing professionals provided automated performance and functional testing. The testing automation was conducted with the help of the Coded UI Test framework.
Results
The Customer got the overall QA project strategy developed, their employees got a profound understanding of how QA standards should be implemented during the CRM development, several Microsoft-based tools were introduced to ensure relevant control over the software development and testing processes. A comprehensive test strategy was designed, including automated performance and functional testing.
Methodologies and Tools
TMMi, Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Microsoft Test Manager, Coded UI Test.
