The Inovis Blog

Inovis is an organization that takes pride in all we do, and we strive to produce products and services that are of top-notch quality for our customers.  We employ many tools to help us measure and maintain the level of quality we desire in our software; one such tool is Hewlett-Packards’ Quality Center.

Inovis has deployed Quality Center in the software development environment to help us control the quality of our software.  The tool is used to organize all software requirements, track all defect and enhancement requests, and maintain and execute all tests scripts.  Using the tool in this manner allows us the ability to get full traceability for the work we perform on any software development project, and we can tie defects and tests back to the original requirements relatively easy.  The tool also provides great visibility into the health of our projects by providing meaningful metrics for each of our projects.

As Inovis continuously improves the way we go about the work of software development, we will evolve the manner in which we use Quality Center.  The manner in which we capture and track requirements is evolving from a traditional “waterfall” approach where the Product Owner develops a document that must go through several approval cycles before work can begin, to a process whereby conversations between the development and QA resources and the Product Owners are the source for these same requirements.  Once the conversations have been completed, the requirements are completed.   Development can then go off and perform their coding, QA can go off and execute their test planning and scripting, and everyone involved in the project has a complete understanding of what we’re trying to get to for that project..  We’re striving to resolve the requirements definition in a much shorter timeframe immediately from the front end of each project so that once the requirements are completed work can begin.. We use Quality Center to help capture and track the requirements, and also to capture work performed against the requirements so we always know where we are in the development process against those requirements.

We also use Quality Center to track our defects. When we are performing testing for a release, the test analysts  will enter anything that doesn’t quite do what it’s supposed to do as a defect.  The software development team tracks defect activity within Quality Center and works to ensure all critical issues are resolved before the project is released to our production environments.  Also, we have integrated Quality Center with our Customer Support ticketing system and track any customer-reported issues in need of software development resolution within Quality Center.  As we work through our  projects and releases we use the tool to help us organize the defects and enhancements we are addressing in that release, and can track and report our progress against the release with simple reports available from within the tool.   As with requirements, the use of Quality Center to help track the status of our defects helps us gain much greater visibility into the progress and health of our software development projects.

A third feature of Quality Center heavily used by Inovis is the Test Lab and Test Plan module.  This module allows us to do much better planning of our test efforts for each release, and also allows us a place to record and track our test progress and test execution status.  As we look towards moving more of our testing to automated test scripts, we use the test plan and a test lab to help organize those efforts.  Once we have a suite of tests complete, Quality Center helps us organize the tests and allows us to run them from within the tool.  As each test is executed the tool captures the test execution results, whether passed or failed, allowing us to show test coverage, test execution completion, and test success rates for each project under test.  For the automated tests this is done in an unattended manner, and for manual cases the results are captured by the test analyst manually once they complete a test.  The use of Quality Center makes the job of organizing and tracking test efforts much easier, and again allows visibility into the projects as they are being prepared for deployment in our production environments.

The latest version of Quality Center has added some new features that we will be taking advantage of in the future, but we are definitely making great use of this tool within the Inovis software development environment today to help us keep the level of quality in our products and serves at the high level we as an organization want them to be at.  We will continue our use of the tool because it allows us to have a better idea of where we are in a release cycle and it provides visibility into the health of our projects. All around, the Inovis Quality Center helps us provide top-notch products and serves, and will continue to drive improvement in all of our solutions.