Posts in category: Learnings & Experiences

Customer is a major technology innovator and global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications. Their products enable the delivery of voice, video, data and multimedia to and throughout the home, the office and the mobile environment.

The principal in US wanted to explore the possibility of moving core product development to their captive center in India with business case analyzed and approved. The challenge however was that they were unsure on the time required to build the engineers with domain knowledge and relevant experience. The impact of such delay on road map and associated planned revenue was identified as major risk. Could STAG mitigate this risk? Read more.

One Manager responsible for development was relocated to India and given this responsibility to build the initial team and show success. Offer for full time senior person to manage QA was made and they were waiting for him to join. With the market going through some turbulence, getting a person full-time on board to take over QA responsibility was also taking its own time.

The management was aware STAG took up a challenge in the past to arrest their defect escape. So they threw in the new one – to build an effective QA team with the following goals:

• Build initial set of QA team in 3 different sub-groups
• Complete knowledge transfer or ramp-up time will go as per business plan
• Build complete test lab on-time
• Commit deliverables and adhere to the plan
• Show the improvement in productivity and quality over time
• Transition core team to be part of customer organization if all set goals are met and partner with them to build temp staff required to achieve the new set of goals for product road map

We identified a large team – some with knowledge in HyBIST & STEM™ but new to domain, AND the rest with experienced in testing from the same industry. Both were then given a clear definition of quarterly goals under focus and STAG way of tracking and ensuring that how we measure customer expectation. Entire team worked closely with QA Manager to setup complete lab and commit release dates for some customer key releases and delivered on-time with acceptable quality defined.

Having the complete lab and no constraints to skip any type of tests, team started enhancing their scope, improving test assets thereby increasing stake holder’s confidence further. Certain area for automation identified and new members were added to support this initiative. With multiple releases experience team understood the dependencies and started defining right scope regression and release cycle time reduced wherever business situation demanded.

Typical success factors like good planning, effective tracking, timely release with good quality, team flexibility and attitude towards business impact was seen in every subsequent release. Both Development and QA got the required approval to take the core team on board and define the temp staff requirement and duration to manage the rest of the releases in road map. Journey continuing with STAG being a QA partner, some members smoothly transitioned to customer organization as core team and additional extended team requirement is still supported by STAG.

1. What was thought as tough constrains to meet and build the team on-time was achieved with our approach which had high impact on revenue plans defined for that product line
2. Full-time core team formation and extended team as contractors working fine
3. Smooth transition ownership of a product line was achieved as per plan

Business is good when you are alone on top. If you are not prudent, however mightiest one may be, a small nudge by somebody could pull you all the way down. Our customer is the market leader in providing learning solutions to Universities and school. Apart from innovative solutions, they proved to be business smart by outsourcing to India not just for cost benefits, but also quality equivalent to their team.

Senior management of the organization had apprehensions of its success, owing to Competency, Process, Training, Communication and Cultural differences. Did STAG manage to allay their fears?  Read on.

With headquarter in Washington DC, US; the customer is the largest E-Learning provider in the School and University space. Growing competition was driving the product team for newer innovation, quicker concept-to-market and higher quality. As the development team shift gear into an agile mode, the pressure was on the QA to cut down the test cycle time and qualify the products quicker with the same effectiveness. The small team was found wanting for additional people. Aggressive deadlines convinced the management to outsource some parts of testing. We realized the initial challenge would be to reinforce the customer confidence on their decision to outsource. This would mean total transparency and a continuous communication channel to know the team’s day-to-day activities. It was also necessary that we adapt their QA process and the terminologies they use. The time involved in setting up the team and ramp-up was very short. This meant we would need someone travel to US on a short notice and undergo product training and be back and transfer the knowledge to the team.

The team was chosen based on previous experience with testing web applications and previous teaching experiences. Having functional experts meant resolving many of the issues internally.  On return to India after product and process training, the test lead initiated knowledge transfer to team. The training incorporated various topics including setup, features and test process. Once the training was complete, the team started executing dry runs of the test. Though the main objective was to understand the client’s test process, it was also the quickest way to learn the product.

The setup activity happened in close coordination with the onsite analysts and support team. This also helped verify the installation manual. The setup involved multi-platform & multi database test lab and was organized within a week of the engagement.

• Significant reduction in test execution cycle time (66%)
• Created excellent knowledge base so that subsequent ramp-up of team was done with just one week notice
• The depth of knowledge of testing demonstrated by team gave confidence and team was allowed to update test cases. This helped in reducing defect escapes to the field by 13% to 4%
• Started with four engineers as experiment in outsourcing helped them to outsource major part of test execution (22 engineers) in eight weeks time

Achievements

• We managed short-notice deadlines (as less as 2 days) by stretching ourselves when needed
• We executed more than 60 cycles of testing on three major releases, and six minor releases(hot-fixes and service packs)
• We helped the client to stop many critical issues from escaping
• They seek and trust our ‘Quality’ advice in a ‘go-no-go’ situation
• We accepted the challenge of simultaneously testing multiple versions
• We work with their support team to isolate field defects
• Our test lab has been flexible to the changing system requirements
• We add and maintain their test documents
• We are able to reset the test lab in 4 hrs to a newer configuration
• We are able to increase the team size with only one week notice(whenever needed)
• We have the ability to make a new engineer productive in 3 days!
• We internally developed the training material to create a strong knowledge transfer
• We have completed testing on/ahead of the schedule 95% of the cycles
• We have brought down the test cycle time by over 60%
• We provide status update daily and we do a rain check every alternative week over a T-Con
• We internally resolve 4 out of every 5 clarifications needed by our engineers, before we approach the client – We ‘disturb’ the customer less!

The Intelligence department of Karnataka Police decided to implement a solution to analyze the Call Detail Record (CDR) from telecom service providers. The tool was to be deployed across the state. The solution can provide critical information about subscribers whose CDR is analyzed – location, geographic movement, calls to other monitored suspects etc. This information is very critical for any case in the present times.  The head of this initiative, a very IT savvy Officer, decided that the solution needs to be validated by a specialist organization, if it has to be defect free. In came STAG.

The solution is a Call Detail Record analyzer intended for Law Enforcement or Intelligence Analysts who have to, need to, want to, or are expected to, work with telephone call detail records. A CDR is composed by fields that describe the exchange, i.e. the number making the call, number receiving the call, start time, duration, end time, route taken, etc. The tool also integrates with mapping server, enabling a visual display of the routes and locations of the suspect.

The solution was being developed by a small but very inventive team from a small town. However, being a small team meant the code was self-validated. This made the customer a little jittery. They sought STAG’s services to validate the solution end-to-end.

STAG assessed the development process of the organization, to understand how well it was built. The application then had to be put through thorough multi-level evaluation, starting from field level to load testing. The tool inched its way slowly through these gates, and required structural modification to clear some. STAG worked closely with the department during the training and saw through a successful release. The tool immediately started cracking some pending cases and is now sought after in the other states.