Reducing software quality assurance costs

When creating software, any developer faces three interrelated problems: rising costs, improving quality, and bringing a product to market on time. The larger and more complex the software, the more significant these problems for the company and the more urgent the question of their solution arises.

At the heart of all the above problems are several components: testing, security and requirements. Consider them in more detail.

• Testing is a very painful question for developers. Traditional testing methods do not meet modern requirements (for example, methods are lagging behind rapidly changing software, manual testing does not scale, there is no experience in performance testing, poor automation). Up to 80% of development costs are incurred in identifying and correcting defects. 25-30% of the development time is spent on testing, and the tight deadlines only aggravate the situation.
• Security, more precisely, security of web applications. Gartner estimates that up to 2/3 of applications have serious vulnerabilities. 75% of attacks pass through applications, almost 45% of security breaches are caused by actions of privileged users, 40-60% of user accounts do not belong to active users.
• Requirements. Often, even at the early stages of a project, the requirements for the future software were not agreed with the customers, as a result of which more and more requirements arise for the product, which leads to significant rework, delays and quality deterioration, having a negative effect on financial results. Here are some sad figures: 41% of projects do not provide the expected return on investment, more than 40% of the IT development budget is due to the correction of errors in determining requirements.

As experience shows, optimization of each of these components separately will not solve problems. Here it is necessary to solve the problem in a complex, using advanced methods of automation and teamwork.

This is the approach used in the IBM Rational Quality business solution .
Management . Briefly, the algorithm of actions of this decision can be described as follows: indicators of the project implementation are tied to roles for each specific point in time. This binding is combined with trends, best practices and proven assets, which allows for faster decision making.
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The Rational Quality Management solution is based on three programs:

Quality assurance based on risk source management is the responsibility of IBM Rational Quality Manager 2.0.1 . This program helps to identify the sources of defects, allows you to prioritize test execution, maximizes the effectiveness of manual testing, analyzes in real time and provides information in the form of dashboards and models.

The automation of routine manual testing is the responsibility of the IBM Rational Functional Tester 8.1 program. In addition to testing based on scenarios and visualization of operations, the program supports the possibility of teamwork - integrates with Rational Team Concert and Rational Quality Manager, and also supports testing applications using technologies from Oracle, SAP, Java, .NET, Siebel, Adobe FX, Dojo, System z, System i.



The third IBM Rational Performance Tester v8.1 solution program is responsible for automating performance testing.

In addition to testing, the Rational Quality Management solution does an excellent job with security. App Scan is responsible for security testing.



If we talk about specific programs, then Rational AppScan OnDemand (automated testing of the security level of web applications and services) and Policy Tester OnDemand (quality of websites and compliance with HIPPA, COPPA, Safe Harbor) are responsible for security.

Rational Requirements Composer is responsible for overseeing the coordination of requirements. The algorithm of this decision is as follows: the active participation of stakeholders from the earliest stages for the accelerated determination of the “right” requirements; increasing agility, also aligning actions with real needs; reduced processing and accelerated product release. In this case, all the work in coordination is not beyond the scope of office applications or the company's own tools. Using this tool can significantly reduce the cost of software development. The numbers are impressive. For example, it is estimated that the return on investment over three years is 439%.



Thus, the IBM Rational Quality Management solution uses a comprehensive testing process model, integrated integrated technologies, industry test solutions, advanced defect analysis processes and quality management. The results from using this solution are impressive: the quality rises by 30-70%, testing cycles are reduced by 20-50%, development costs are reduced by 25-60%, i.e. the number of requests for changes decreases, the release times of the software are not violated and, therefore, the costs do not increase.

Learn more: www-01.ibm.com/software/ru/smb/rational/quality/index.html