Solution Validation and Verification

This is our separate independent testing service that is designed to exploit our proprietary best practices ( ValidationBench) for assisting clients in validating their technology acquisition efforts.

The service comprises both planning and validation offerings which can be configured and customized to fit the specific needs and constraints of the engagement:

Planning Offerings

Validation Planning, the overall analysis of the client project goals, domain, and scope, and the corresponding preparation of a comprehensive validation plan deliverable that describes in detail the strategy and approach that will be used to fully validate the technology in a manner consistent with the client’s goals; ideally carried out in parallel with the completion of requirements and design, this offering can nevertheless be conducted throughout the project lifecycle to produce highly targeted acceptance, integration, and unit test plans for all or selected subsets of the application or technology being implemented

Requirements Coverage Analysis, the development of an engineered set of validation strategies for each business requirement that is intended to be supported by the technology under development or extension; this requirements based method (an integral part of the Validation Planning offering above) can be used separately—even if test plans already exist—to ensure that the validation efforts (and the supporting project delivery efforts carried out by client personnel, as well) have been optimized to minimize cost and schedule while maximizing the number of flaws and defects that can be identified and isolated, thus dramatically improving the delivered quality of the technology

Packaging Planning, the analysis and preparation of optimal packaging alternatives for the technology to reduce risk and increase flexibility in project delivery; packages are simply containers for allocating delivered functionality: Modules, collections of individual software programs, subroutines, tables, and related technology components; modules are the smallest units of packaging Builds, groups of logically related modules that deliver a well-defined subset of the total functionality, i.e., operational sets of business requirements, builds are the smallest units of usable functionality Releases, ordered sequence of builds that define a particular production implementation stage or version of the application; releases are the major units of production implementation Project itself, the definition of the set of releases that comprise the project’s full operational scope

Validation Offerings

Test Case Development, the preparation of the specific test runs, test cases, and expected results that form the primary operational deliverables of the engagement; the creation of test libraries, automated scripts, and regression mechanisms are typically an integral part of this offering

Requirements Validation, the actual execution of the associated test runs and test cases, and the subsequent development of failure reports for each instance where the actual results do not satisfy the predefined expected results; this is the primary testing activity of the engagement

Failure Analysis, the detailed examination of each failure and the corresponding analysis of the business requirements and supporting specifications and software components to identify root causes and underlying defects (i.e., the specific bugs that resulted in the failure of the test case); this activity, depending upon the project’s goals and structure, is typically carried out in close cooperation with the client project team in order to increase learning, facilitate continuous improvement, and reduce overall cycle time

Regression Testing, the re-planning and subsequent re-validation of business requirements that were previously validated, but due to downstream failures must now be re-tested using the newly corrected technology components that previously supported those requirements; careful planning and management of this activity can substantially reduce project cost, schedule, and risk

Package Acceptance, the planning, development, and execution of the validation approaches for assisting client user personnel (sponsors, executives, and internal subject matter experts) in their formal acceptance of the various packages that make up the full delivery of the technology; this activity is focused on the customer acceptance of the technology and is often carried out separately from the typically development-based unit and integration testing activities

Other Process services:

Strategic Governance Implementation Process Quality Assessment and Action Plan Process Service Level Improvement Solution Delivery Project Quality and Risk Assessment Project Management