Measuring Success for Your Enterprise Testing

How well is your quality and testing organization doing? How can you measure its effectiveness? If you aren’t able to answer these questions, your testing organization might not be operating as efficiently as it could be. We’re all familiar with the results of poor testing on implementation projects; go-live dates that keep getting moved to the right or on-time delivery with half-baked functionality. With a proper assessment of your testing processes you can know what your chances are of making that go-live date with acceptable quality. You’ll also know how well changes were tested before being introduced into your production environment. Enterprise testing is becoming increasingly important in payer environments. IT systems are vital to everyday operations. Gaining control over all environments is essential to drive down costs and decrease problems that affect all aspects and bottom-lines. In this series of articles, I’ll be addressing all testing-related activities that a payer should use in deploying its business markets or lines of business. Periodic assessment, followed by continuous improvement will improve the testing process and have positive impacts on enterprise quality, configuration productivity, and cycle-time reduction efforts. I propose looking at several specific areas across your IT environment. The 14 Quality Maturity Indicators (QMIs) measured in an assessment are:

1. Test Management & Organizations
2. Master Test Plan & Test Strategy
3. Test Plans
4. Test Execution
5. Test Cases
6. Process & Standards Used
7. Tools Used
8. Automation Capabilities
9. Regression Testing Capabilities
10. Test Environments
11. Performance Testing Approach
12. Metrics Used
13. Defect Management Process
14. Training

Once a proper assessment is provided the findings for these 14 QMIs can be used by any number of individuals or teams within an organization to improve testing processes and capabilities. Some examples include:

• Internal assessment team – to identify current testing capability
• Upper management – to initiate a testing improvement program
• Software quality assurance management – to develop and implement process improvement plans
• Configuration/Development teams – to improve testing effectiveness
• Users/health plans – to define their role in the testing process.

In the upcoming series of articles I’ll outline each of the 14 QMIs in greater detail. I’ll conclude by providing a step-by-step assessment process for your team. Stay tuned for updates.