Quality Department in ESKADENIA and CMMI

• ESKADENIA Quality Management
  ESKADENIA understands the importance of meeting quality and industry standards; this is why they have established the Quality Department in order to provide high standards for all ESKADENIA products.
  
  Quality is a driver for each employee. The quality management department strives to ensure the highest standards, procedures, processes and work routines that will be implemented in the company, the departments and the product level.
  
  
• How ESKADENIA does it
  ESKADENIA is determined to achieve the right quality for all their work process. In doing so, adopting essential tools and methods to make it a reality.
  
  Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)
  CMMI is ESKADENIA’s framework to manage quality activities in software production. CMMI for Development from the CMMI Institute, USA is currently considered to be the most widely accepted and adopted method for work process development. After ESKADENIA received its first CMMI DEV Level-3 accreditation in February 2011, all projects were required to comply with the standards of the Level-3 framework.
  
  Quality and collaboration tools
  The Team Foundation Server (TFS) is a tool made for team collaborations. All work elements will need to be logged into TFS, such as any requirements, tasks, bugs, test cases and more. All processes that comply with CMMI and all templates, guidelines and descriptions are available via SharePoint. SharePoint is integrated with TFS to archive all documents and data needed; this platform of documents is called Caterpillar.
  
  Process improvement and SPIG
  Employees and members are able to provide process improvement suggestions, which include any recommendations for the development of its employees or company. All improvement proposals may be submitted to the Software Process Improvement Group (SPIG), which is a committee managed by the QA manager to define, control, monitor and improve all software operations within ESKADENIA.

Projects Types

ESKADENIA focuses on implementing the right standards and policies to maintain the quality of all their projects. The ESKADENIA projects fall under two main categories.


• Development Projects
  Projects that result in new products and services, requiring a substantial amount of coding and development. Some of these new development projects are sometimes referred to as Change Requests, which are requests made by clients for a new feature on an existing system.   
• Deployment Projects
  Projects that require the installation of off-the-shelf products in the client’s server. They usually require some level of customization, which is referred to as Gaps.

Project phases and software development lifecycle

All ESKADENIA projects go through detailed phases to ensure the quality and success of a product. The main phases of ESKADENIA’s software lifecycle can be divided into the following.


• Initiation phase
  The initiation phase is the first phase in the project life cycle. Once a decision is made to develop/deploy a product, the initiation phase begins. The project is kicked off and stakeholders are identified.
• Planning phase
  During the planning phase, the project manager (PM) works towards identifying the project timeline and cost for any engagement, measurement, configurable items, work approach, roles and responsibilities and reporting. The PM will also establish the policies and procedures that will govern the project. This will all be communicated to the project’s team, with a committed scope, plan and requirements.
• Definition & analysis phase
  The business analyst will create requirements at this phase, where it will be modelled, validated, reviewed, approved and logged into TFS. Keeping track of all requirements is essential to control possible changes.
• Design phase
  Designers will design the user interface and identify the software architecture. Any testing will then be planned, and test scenarios are identified, where all test scenarios and cases will be linked with the requirements.
• Development phase 
  The goal of the Development Phase is to develop the system objects and components. Once the system objects have been developed, they are integrated to form a working application. Some development work may continue into the testing phase, depending on the results of initial testing. Any coding should adhere to the internal coding standards. Remember to ask your supervisor for the coding standards document.
  
The main activities in this phase include:
• 1. Environment preparation
• 2. Coding and Unit Testing
• 3. Code review 
• Testing phase
  The testing phase is when the test scenarios are executed by following the different test types. Bugs are logged into TFS and linked with test cases. Test cases can be passed, failed or not executed. Regression testing is implemented once bugs have been mitigated, to ensure everything was done correctly. At the end of this phase, several reports are submitted to the stakeholders providing statistical information about the detected bugs.
• Deployment phase
  The deployment phase consists of the following steps:
• 1. Installation guide
  Provides step by step instructions, which guides the installer through the installation process.
• 2. Operation and maintenance
  Operation and maintenance describe in detail how to configure and deploy the system and integrate it with other third parties platform.
• 3. User manual
  User Manual includes the information needed to work with the system.
• 4. Training guide
  The training guide is a document that explains the system and how to use it.
• 5. Release note
  The release note document lists functionalities available within a certain release, highlighting bugs and changes.
• 6. Closure phase
  The closure phase is important to finalize the project’s activities and obtain acceptance from the clients. At the end of the project, the team members will evaluate any points worth discussing, as well as any measures collected throughout all the project phases.

Monitoring the projects

All project team members are expected to collaborate with the PM in order to achieve the following.

• Identify the risks, monitor them and take the needed actions to mitigate/prevent the risks.
• Identify issues, log them, monitor them and lead them to closure.
• Provide the PM with any needed statistics, such as effort and time spent on completing tasks and the number of bugs.
• Provide consistent status reporting to monitor progress of the projects.

Measurements

ESKADENIA understands the best way to control and achieve high quality products and results are by implementing measurement standards. The PM will identify the measures that need to be collected at the beginning of each new project.
The measures collected usually consists of the following:

• Schedule Performance Indicator (SPI). Used to measure whether the team has achieved the results required and whether everything was delivered on time or not.
• Bug analysis. Used to study any detected bugs and what are the root causes of the bugs.
• Compliance reports. Used to measure compliance standards of the CMMI and any other defined standards.

Auditing

This process is used to evaluate work processes in regards to the process descriptions, standards and procedures, where the quality management team will then validate the results based on standards and requirements collected from the stakeholders.

Auditing activities will be conducted for on-going projects to ensure that projects are following ESKADENIA’s defined processes, are being assessed in terms of effectiveness and introduce improvements based on the auditing results.

Auditing provides management and project members with objective insights into products and processes to ensure they conform to specified policies, standards, process descriptions and procedures.


Change Management

ESKADENIA understands the inevitable changes a company will need to face in day to day processes, whether internally or externally.  This is why ESKADENIA has come prepared with the change management team, ready to foresee any changes required by different projects and stakeholders.

Change management is needed in order to achieve the following benefits:

• Ensure that the project property (software and documents) is physically secure at all times.
• Protect the integrity of completed project deliverables.
• Ensure that work in progress is secure and backed up on a regular basis.
• Control and track updates made to completed project deliverables.
• Ensure that appropriate versions of project deliverables are used.
• Control the release and issuance of updated project deliverables.
• Ensure that related deliverables are kept in alliance with each update.