Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance is one of the most difficult to master delivery disciplines. Yet, QA is the final gate keeper before an application is deployed.  This places a particularly heavy burden on the quality of the QA process and the people running it.

QA teams typically find themselves struggling to identify test cases and plans that have minimal redundancy and maximum coverage. These challenges are compounded by the lack of time, repeatability and control, and insight into the risk incurred, given the time and scope of testing that the business allows.

Compuware provides a progressive set of solutions that help QA teams address these issues and become a trusted partner in ensuring quality.

Code Quality

Compuware’s Code Quality solution allows IT to build quality into applications from the earliest phases of the development life cycle, rather than attempting to test it in after the fact. Industry statistics show that today’s developer can spend up to 50% of a workday finding and fixing troublesome bugs – time that should go toward developing innovative applications that deliver competitive advantages for the organization.

Compuware Code Quality delivers capabilities to debug, test and tune application code at any point in the development lifecycle, which is particularly powerful in a fully integrated testing approach. Code Quality also provides management visibility into key quality metrics during the development process to facilitate proactive remediation. The result: development and QA teams detect a broader range of coding and logic errors earlier in the lifecycle, before they become costly problems in production.

Test Management

Compuware Test Management provides a web-enabled test development, planning and execution environment that helps customers focus on minimizing risk by prioritizing the most valuable functionality from a business perspective.

Any testing effort should start with a solid and precise understanding of the business requirements and their value. Test Management enables customers to collaboratively define a precise representation of the business requirements. These requirements are automatically translated into an initial set of test requirements, tests and scripts. This not only provides QA teams with a significant productivity boost, but it also ensures that testing efforts remain closely aligned with the business priorities reflected in the requirements.

Too much testing is wasteful, and too little can be catastrophic. The objective is to apply testing where it will do the most good.  Ideally, QA teams base the amount and extent of testing on managing risk at a level appropriate for the business.  Test Management provides customers with at-a-glance insight into how much testing is needed to achieve the risk tolerance level – in other words, when testing is complete.

Risk based test development prioritization greatly reduces the upfront work that QA teams typically have to perform before testing can start. Also, in the face of shrinking deadlines, minimizing the impact of reduced testing is of paramount importance. Test Management enables QA teams to provide stakeholders with an objective assessment of the risk incurred given the allocated time for testing. This facilitates establishing a collective agreement on the scope of testing and the resulting risk to the business, and turns QA into a trusted partner.

Testing assets are accumulated and reused with each application release, resulting in increased efficiency and reduced time to market. Test Management also provides advanced support for test automation and automated regression testing, test data management, test asset management and defect tracking.

Quality Management

Delivering consistent results requires consistent execution.  Compuware Quality Management provides the infrastructure necessary to monitor and control the performance of your quality processes. 

Quality Management extends Test Management with a patented QA methodology that includes automated workflow, metrics, dashboard reporting and document templates. This jumpstarts customer’s growth to repeatable, consistent and optimized execution of their QA efforts.

Consistent results require continuous insight into the status and results of QA efforts. Quality Management therefore collects an array of metrics that customers can measure their application quality against. Quality Management ties test cases and defects to the business requirements to which the metrics are automatically rolled up. Managers can set goals for these metrics so that go/no go decisions can be made accurately, in time, and against objective, agreed-upon benchmarks.

CARS

Quality is a concern that spans all disciplines of the application delivery process. Requirements, quality analysis, code quality analysis, functional testing, performance testing and security testing are all indispensable elements of a mature quality practice. The Compuware Application Reliability Solution (CARS) brings all these aspects together in the most comprehensive offering in the market.

CARS extends Quality Management with award-winning best-of-breed tools for Application Performance Assurance, Code Quality and Security Testing. It integrates the results of all tools into a comprehensive dashboard solution that enables managers to monitor the adherence to company goals for all aspects of quality. This greatly increases the confidence with which applications can be released.

CARS provides QA organizations with QA certified experts that help customers accelerate their growth to a mature quality practice that works for them. CARS helps customers install a consistent discipline across development, quality assurance and operations that customers can subsequently further evolve at their own pace. This greatly speeds up application delivery, reduces redundancies, lowers costs and makes the organization much more effective at delivering quality consistently and predictably.