The Software Risk Reducers

A real-life example of how working as a team trumps a lone operator working on their own agenda.

A case study on why Team QA strategy is more important than individual crusades

Some organisations’ approach to software quality is to hire in someone with a few years experience to start some testing activities.  This is usually governed by two things: 1. They believe hiring in a relatively inexperienced tester is the way to go (they’re not seeing that many quality issues) and 2. They only allocate enough budget to hire someone with not much experience (most of the budget was for developers and business development). Fast forward some months and the organisation often finds itself with the ‘icecream cone’ testing triangle, i.e. a hoard of UI automated tests that rapidly become flaky and less useful, with few unit tests giving early feedback on the product. An alternative is to engage the services of fractional QA leadership, where you then find yourself working with someone who is providing value way above your permanent hire budget.  This person is thinking about your long-term strategy as well as the immediate remediations.  From here, the chances of starting off on the right foot are much higher. Get Fractional QA Leadership https://lnkd.in/eJszdPnQ #fractional #riskreducers #riskmanagement #consultancy #qualityassurance #productquality

A CTO we spoke to last week said if only she could send a message out to each user that left her service for the competition, and try to win them back.  We joked, but it would be along the lines of the below:

Unsure how to start QA in your organisation? Quality is fast becoming your most burning issue but what do you do about it? Hire someone? Get an existing team member to ‘turn their hand’ to quality? Most software development organisations start out without QA people. Some have unit tests but do not spend much time on testing beyond that. UAT becomes the bug filter, and is finding increasingly more issues. Soon, they’ll be unable to release anything as the risk of failure is too high. Often, decisions following this are not fully considered and are knee-jerk reactions to put a patch over the issue. A popular one is to hire an Automation Tester to create a mammoth suite of Automated UI tests. This can lead to flaky tests, false red and green tests, and further production issues. Rather than diving in and going down a path that only patches things up, some strategic QA leadership will provide a path to long-term remediation. This requires a bigger investment to hire in though. An alternative option is #fractional leadership. You gain the strategic leadership, the defined path and steps to success. And the consistent drive from someone who's done it before comes at a lower investment than the long-term recruitment approach. Fractional QA leadership can set you on the right path and coach you in getting there, guiding you along the way until that time you no longer need it. TSRR has two fractional QA leaders, so you benefit from more than 50 years’ experience. It’s a compelling option and a worthwhile investment when weighed against the cost and benefits of jumping from one patch-up to the next or a permanent hire with much less experience. #fractional #riskreducers #riskmanagement #consultancy #qualityassurance #productquality

You want the perfect product that receives frequent updates, but have never quite cracked how to do this and maintain reliability and robustness?  Picture the situation, a company needs to make their new product sing for the end users, to be that reliable and useful item. The past attempts have shown that this never quite becomes reality, for various reasons. One area of constant concern is quality whilst releasing often. It’s just never that good, and there are always bugs found in production. A common approach is to “have many eyes on it” by hiring people to write test scripts based on user activity and to have them continually step through these scenarios manually, regardless of what has changed. This will work for the first release, maybe one or two updates after that. It definitely isn’t a process for the long-term though. We can help. We’ve reshaped practices and processes in many companies to enable frequent, stable, reliable releases of software, providing the kind of product that your end users will maybe not sing about, but they’ll certainly be happy with it and recommend others use it. #fractional #riskreducers #riskmanagement #consultancy #qualityassurance #productquality

Principal Consultants to sell, Junior Consultants to deliver - sound familiar? The people behind TSRR have been working as consultants for the last 20 years. Throughout that time, there has been a common mention they have heard from people who have hired in consultancies. It is that the people who provided the initial sales pitch, and formulated the overarching plan of how to help the client, were never the people who saw the whole implementation and delivery through to the successful conclusion. It’s an understandable approach, bring in your most senior and seasoned people to convince the client that the consultancy can do the work, then let more junior people replace them to execute on the plan, still confident that these people are capable of doing so. As long as the outcome is acceptable (i.e. successful delivery/conclusion), there’s no problem, right? From what we hear, that’s not the case. There’s a perception of paying top fees because the people are the most senior and thus the service will be exceptional; then junior people arrive who, although they can build the product, have yet to learn the advanced consultancy skills that their more senior colleagues have. At TSRR, there’s no need to worry about any of this. The people you’ll speak to will be the people you’ll work with throughout the whole engagement. No exceptions. #fractional #riskreducers #riskmanagement #consultancy #qualityassurance #productquality

Redundancy is exactly what we seek at TSRR.  It’s a win-win for us and our clients. Once we have agreed with you that our software risk reduction work is done, and your in-house team is up and running with the optimisations we’ve worked on with you, then there is no further need for us. You win because your own people are in control of how things are done; we win because we are able to spread the TSRR love to the next deserving client.

A case study on how UAT was impeding releasing and measures taken to improve the situation.

If you have a UAT Phase and it's growing this case study could offer some tips.