Compuware Quality Management helps manage software testing, QA |
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By Michelle Davidson, Site Editor
16 Feb 2007 | SearchSoftwareQuality.com |
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Many software testing and quality assurance (QA) organizations are stuck in the cycle of continuously testing applications and don't have a clear process in place or a way to monitor their process.
Compuware hopes to change that with its new quality assurance solution -- Compuware Quality Management. Quality Management was designed to help QA organizations define and develop a quality process -- to help them put metrics in place and give managers a view into that process, said Mike Burba, marketing director for Compuware Application Delivery Solutions.
"We want to provide repeatability and consistency of the QA process," Burba said.
Quality Management acts as a stepping stone between Compuware's Test Management product and its Quality Governance solution (CARS). Test Management helps testing teams become more productive and efficient through automation, while Quality Governance addresses quality from project initiation to project deployment, Burba said. The problem is few are getting past the testing phase and into governance, he said.
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QA organizations need to standardize their quality process, put the proper metrics in place, and then continuously undergo process improvement.
Thomas Murphy
research director, Gartner
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"We've found that only 20% of the market is ready for governance, and 80% is stuck on test management," Burba said. "They've bought a lot of testing tools, but their challenge is how to get a more measured way to get to quality governance. Many times they don't have a defined QA process, so it's impossible for them to go beyond QA."
And because they don't have a process, they don't have a way to go back and say here's what the data says and why the quality is bad, Burba added.
That's where Quality Management comes in. It gives QA organizations the ability to track their process -- to set goals and track those goals, said Jason Swafford, product manager for Compuware Quality Assurance Solutions.
"They know they should create a process, but because they have 20 tests going on at the same time, they can't take anyone off of those to get this started," Burba added. "This gives them a starting point. They don't need to do it all at once, but they can start small and build on it. Then when they're ready, they can move to the Quality Governance tool."
Thomas Murphy, research director at Gartner, agreed with the need to focus on the quality process.
"The next step for the software quality assurance industry is to move to a more sophisticated level of quality process management," he said in a statement. "To do this effectively, QA organizations need to standardize their quality process, put the proper metrics in place, and then continuously undergo process improvement. By doing this, quality organizations will be able to deliver quality applications on a repeatable basis."
Quality Management is built on Compuware's test management solution. It ships with Compuware's QualityPoint methodology, dashboards to give insight into tracking goals and data, cross-project reporting, and workflow capabilities.
About 30 metrics are available out of the box to help organizations monitor such things as how well the process is working, how well the organization is functioning, and how well the tests are functioning.
Compuware Quality Management is available now. Visit Compuware's Web site for more information.
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