White Papers

Key Resources for Managing Application Quality

A Practical Roadmap to Higher Quality
Have you ever heard of a company that doesn't want to deliver quality? Are there any IT organizations that refuse to test or even review their deliverables? Hopefully, the answer is a resounding no. People and companies want to do the right thing. The desire for quality exists everywhere. But how quality is implemented, how much it costs and the extent of its benefits vary significantly from organization to organization. Tradeoffs between schedules, resources and budgets force many projects to settle for "good enough," gaining as much quality as project contraints and current practices allow. But is "good enough" really good enough? This paper explores the virtues of "building in" versus "bolting on" quality, identifies several different quality methodologies and will help readers find the most pragmatic and beneficial path for achieving quality objectives.

Four Courses of Application Quality Assurance
Compuware's one-of-a-kind roadshow, "The Four Courses of Quality," featured world-class chefs and sommeliers, who shared their secrets about delivering signature dishes and top quality dining. IT executives and leaders in attendance discovered surprising similarities between creating a memorable meal and delivering high-quality, enterprise-wide applications. Each executive welcomed the opportunity to share lessons learned, and to hear Compuware industry experts discuss progressive approaches to application development and quality. We surveyed the attendees before and after each event to identify common pain points and methodologies. This white paper brings you key insights, experiences and best practices from these highly successful events.

Better Quality through Collaboration
When it comes to improving application quality, there is only so much an individual can do. Placing a high quality application in production is the culmination of a considerable group effort that includes a dynamic mixture of business and IT personnel analyzing, designing, architecting, programming and testing the components that compose the finished product. For these reasons, achieving true application quality is necessarily a team effort. It requires common goals to ensure that everyone working on the project shares the same priorities and objectives. Throughout the project, team members must continuously share, discuss, agree upon and prioritize actions based on rapidly changing information from many sources.

The Business Case for Improving Quality: Compuware Application Reliability Solution
Quality is the gold standard by which an effective application development team is measured. IT managers spend considerable amounts of time trying to find ways to improve the ultimate quality of the applications their teams release, knowing that this is one of the most visible measures of IT's effect on the business. This paper highlights the quality issues that companies are facing and identities specifically how CARS can help organizations optimize testing practices to improve application quality and align with business goals. It also identifies the key decision criteria that companies can use to measure the urgency for improving quality of their testing.

The Business Case for Mitigating Risks: Compuware Application Reliability Solution
It's crunch time. Faced with the potential for application failure and failing to meet business needs, organizations must make decisions to find ways to reduce risks. Whether you like it or not, simply ignoring them won't make them go away. This paper highlights the risk mitigation issues that companies are facing and identifies specifically how a comprehensive quality solution can help organizations reduce risks. It identifies the key decision criteria that companies can use to measure the urgency for mitigating risk, and briefly touches on options such as increasing staff or outsourcing some of the testing, concluding that these options are inadequate for comprehensively mitigating risk.

The Business Case for Lowering Costs: Compuware Application Reliability Solution
Lowering costs is not a new challenge for IT managers, and finding a way to achieve this without sacrificing the quality of the applications being developed and tested can be downright frustrating. IT managers are trapped in a tug-of-war between meeting stricter budgetary goals while delivering what business users need to propel the business forward. This paper highlights the cost issues that companies are facing and identifies specifically how CARS can help organizations control testing while improving testing effectiveness to meet business needs. It also identifies the key decision criteria that companies can use to measure the urgency for improving their testing.

CIO briefing: Maturing your application quality practices
Today's IT organization faces a wide array of challenges. From cutting costs to enabling business innovation, IT executives are asked to do it all--while delivering quality results and superior service on a daily basis. To successfully improve quality, IT organizations must integrate and manage quality at all stages of the application life cycle. Managing quality is a continuous process of identifying, defining, measuring, managing and mitigating risks--or failures--to drive greater business value through better performance, lower costs and more predictable delivery.

The Business Case for Reducing Time-to-Market: Compuware Application Reliability Solution
The competition is closing in. You're feeling the pressure to make your development and deployment process more competitive to meet changing business needs, while balancing the demand to deliver applications that meet quality standards on-time.

Today's quality assurance practices: How can we continue to improve?
IT executives understand that application quality is paramount and that poor quality hurts business and IT reputations. Read this Compuware-commissioned study recently conducted by Forrester Consulting to learn what other IT organizations are doing to ensure they deliver quality applications.

The Business Case for Quality Assurance and Risk Management: Compuware Application Reliability Solution
Readers should take the information in this paper and apply it to their specific testing situation, making a careful evaluation of how quality assurance solutions can impact their business.  Armed with this information, readers will be able to develop a strong business case to recommend an investment in quality assurance tools, practices, and experts to upper management.