COQ --- Cost Of Quality--- How much are you paying for it?

"The cost of quality" --- It’s a term that's widely used & widely misunderstood.

The "cost of quality" isn't the price of creating a quality product or service. It's the cost of NOT creating a quality product or service.

Every time work is redone, the cost of quality increases.

Obvious examples include:

•The reworking of a manufactured item.
•The retesting of an assembly.
•The rebuilding of a tool.
•The correction of a bank statement.
•The reworking of a service, such as the reprocessing of a loan operation or the replacement of a food order in a restaurant.

In short, any cost that would not have been expended if quality were perfect contributes to the cost of quality.

Total Quality Costs

As the figure below shows, quality costs are the total of the cost incurred by:

•Investing in the prevention of nonconformance to requirements.
•Appraising a product or service for conformance to requirements.
•Failing to meet requirements.
Quality Costs—general description


Prevention Costs

The costs of all activities specifically designed to prevent poor quality in products or services.

Examples are the costs of:

•New product review
•Quality planning
•Supplier capability surveys
•Process capability evaluations
•Quality improvement team meetings
•Quality improvement projects
•Quality education and training

Appraisal Costs

The costs associated with measuring, evaluating or auditing products or services to assure conformance to quality standards and performance requirements.

These include the costs of:

•Incoming and source inspection/test of purchased material
•In-process and final inspection/test
•Product, process or service audits
•Calibration of measuring and test equipment
•Associated supplies and materials

Failure Costs

The costs resulting from products or services not conforming to requirements or customer/user needs. Failure costs are divided into internal and external failure categories.

Internal Failure Costs

Failure costs occurring prior to delivery or shipment of the product, or the furnishing of a service, to the customer.

Examples are the costs of:

•Scrap
•Rework
•Re-inspection
•Re-testing
•Material review
•Downgrading

External Failure Costs

Failure costs occurring after delivery or shipment of the product & during or after furnishing of a service to the customer.

Examples are the costs of:

•Processing customer complaints
•Customer returns
•Warranty claims
•Product recalls

Testing Triplets of Achievement( Performance)

"Testing Triplets of Achievement" Nice Word isn't it.

Triplets here mentions a very important aspect of Software Testing which looks into the behaviour & attitude of the software/application. Triplets I mean the Performance Testing, Load Testing & Volume Testing.

Performance Testing - Testing is concentrated on the speed & performance of the system in various workloads.
Load Testing - Testing is concentrated on putting the demands to the system and measuring its response time.It demonstrates on the software program by simulating multiple users accessing the program concurrently.
Volume Testing - Testing is done on the databases.It checks the application by increasing the volume of the datas in the system.It checks for 3 parameters of volume of low, equilibrium & High.

Rate me on my Performance

Performance Testing , What is this all about?
It is similar to how we perform for a job in the same way we check for the performance of the system.We are determined by our attitude,smartness & speed of understanding in the given environment of work.
In the same way an application/Software determine how fast some aspect of a system performs under a particular workload. It also serve to validate and verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability,reliability and resource.
Performance testing can be performed across the web, and even done in different parts of the country,since it is known that the response times of the internet itself vary regionally. It can also be done in-house,although routers would then need to be configured to introduce the lag what would typically occur on public networks.

The Purpose of Performance Testing

• Demonstrate that the systems meets performance criteria.
• Compare two systems to find which performs better.
• Measure what parts of the system or workload cause the system to perform badly.

Common Terms Used in Performance Testing:

• ThroughPut
• Server Response Time
• Render Response Time.

It is important to have a detailed requirements of performance testing & document them as a plan so that we are able to use this for the performance profile tuning.

Hope you all enjoyed topic... Keep me posted your feedback on this article.

My Resume

Hi Prospective Employer,
Iam Looking for an opening & also ready for any business venture in Software Testing . I can share my resume& also give my helping hand for setting up a third party testing company to you. Please contact me at : lsowmya@yahoo.com (or) lsowmya@hotmail.com. I shall certainly revert back to you for further discussion.

thanks & regards,
L.SowmyaNarayanan

My Approach

Hi Everyone,
Its been a long time since i shared my thoughts on testing with all of you. The job search takes most of my time and nulliness in my career is also the reason for that. Sometime during one of the interview a guy from Syntel told me that he is not finding this blog of mine interesting . My answer to him and all those who think in the same is that " My Blog is simple & it is for those people who would like to know what is testing all about and am trying to break those technical jargons which a common man may fail to understand. Making Testing look simple & easier way to understand and is what iam aiming . Iam not teaching on testing in any different way but am sharing them in a manner it is interesting and easy to understand. My approach is different that all. My next topic will be on another topic on testing... what else i know other than that.... testing is the one that keeps me alive and kicking.... see ya all soon.... Cheers..................:)

Are we Ready for Testing?

Are we having our plans in place? We need to have our plans in place else we will be in for a big trouble. Planning is indeed a very important and integral part of our testing process. It is not advisable to go for testing without a proper planning.

A Test Planning is the initial stage that is used by us before we start working on any testing project.A Test Plan Document is prepared which basically contains all the necessary actions & procedures that are needed for the execution of testing.

As Per WikiPedia Definition : A Test Plan is a "A test plan is a document detailing a systematic approach to testing a system such as a machine or software. The plan typically contains a detailed understanding of what the eventual workflow will be."

I define them as "It is a guiding document for any testing project. It is important that a Test plan goes for a review and update itself with the review comments."

Please Find below the contents of a Test Plan:

1.Definition :

It defines the overall purpose of Testing this application/s/w.

2.Roles & Responsibilities:

The people who are involved and what is their role in this project will be defined in this section.

3.Testing Requirements:

The environments, the date and the place the bug tracking tool is kept and all the necessary test environment needed for the execution of testing is defined in this section.

4.Resources:

Resources should include representatives from all areas involved in the application. It will be good that we include representatives from across the systems as it benefits us in validating the systems functions before the upgrade goes live in production.

5.Testing Schedule:

A Testing Schedule contains activities on:

Identify and select testers for Testing
Develop test scenarios and scripts/cases
Validate participants availability for testing
Review scenarios/scripts for accuracy, completeness and sequence
Ensure Testing configuration for testing activities
Testing environment validation
Testing by Testing participants

along with the above information we should also include the resources responsible with the end date for each activity will be recorded for tracking purpose.

6.Assumptions and Risks

Some of the Assumptions of Testing Project are:

Assume#1:The Testing environment will be available and desktops will be available to
perform testing.
Assume#2:The Business team has reviewed and accepted functionality identified in the
business requirements and software requirements documents.
Assume#3:Code walkthroughs/reviews will be completed by the development team.

Some of the Risks of Testing Project are:

Risk #1 - Resources and the Mitigation plan is to have resources in place & also keep the HR help in finding the right resources incase of need.
Risk #2 - Knowledge and the Mitigation plan is to attend required trainings and update the knowledge.
Risk #3 - Timelines and Mitigation Plan is to have the necessary resources and also incase the timelines is not feasible speak out earlier rather than in the end.This will avoid confusion.

7.Additional Project Documents

In this section we will list down all the required documents and also submit all the supportive documents and also specify the area where the documents are located for verification.

8.Sign-off and Acknowledgement
Once the project is completed the Test Manager will sign in the section and also specifying to state that the testing is complete and the quality is ensured it is ready for use.

Once we have the test plan it is important we share it across the senior management and also with respective people who are related with the project. This will make way for clear transition among people working in the project and also the testing goals of the project will be very clear.

Hope you all find this article useful. See you all soon with another exciting article on testing...

Estimation Techniques

When estimating for a testing project to find out the number of resources needed the below techniques will be used by us:

1. Analogous method – Following the previous history of the estimation

2. Parametric model – Expert judgment

3. 3 point estimate – Optimist, Pessimist and Most likely

4. WBS – Work breakdown structure – Simple, Medium and Complex

I would like to thank Mr.Somasundaram at this time for sharing the estimation techniques knowledge with us.Thanks so much Somas.