A Fortune 100 healthcare company building applications for next generation of body scanners, uses many tools including OS, compilers, webservers, diagnostic tools, editors, SDKs, database, networking tools, Browsers, device drivers, project management tools and development libraries. Healthcare domain meant compliance to various government regulations including that of FDAs. One such compliance states that every tool used in the production, should be validated for ‘fitness of use’. This meant as many as 30 tools. How could one possibly test the entire range of applications, before it is used? Considering the diverse range of applications, how could they have one team do it?
STAG was the chosen partner not because we had expertise in healthcare applications, but because of HyBIST enables test teams to rapidly turnaround. For this job, STAG put together a team with sound knowledge of HyBIST.
The team relied on one of the most important stages of the SIX-staged HyBIST – “Understand Expectations” – A scientific approach to “the act of understanding the intentions or expectations” by identifying key elements in a requirement/specification and setting up a rapid personal process powered by scientific concepts to ensure that we quickly understand the intentions and identify the missing information. We look at each requirement and partition these into functional and non-functional aspects and probe into the key attributes to be satisfied for the requirement. We use a key core concept Landscaping that enables us to understand the Market place, end-users, Business flows, architecture and other attributes, and other information elements.
Once a tool is identified, the team gathers more information from the public domain. This ensured the demo from customer (of around 45 minutes) is easily absorbed. During the demo, the customer also shares the key features they intend to use. This information eventually morphs into requirements. The team then explores the application for around 2 days. During this period they come up with a list of good questions, clarify the missing elements and understand the intended behavior. Thus the effort spent to understand and learn the application is as less as 16 hours.