A pharmaceutical company decides to ride the IT bandwagon. They establish a company to develop Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions to meet the demands of small and medium scales Pharmaceutical, Chemical and Food processing industries. The challenge at hand was to build a software development organization and release the first version of the product in six months to the market. With all the functional experts it had, the solution specially designed and developed for pharmaceutical Industry specific best practices, could not fail. Or did it?
The ERP solution complies with Current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) and requirements of International Regulatory Bodies such as US FDA, EDQM, TGA, MHRA, MCC, etc. The challenge at hand was to build a software development organization and release the first version of the product in six months to the market. Considering the tight timeline for product release the company preferred to jumpstart its QA process by partnering with a third party testing organization specialized in test engineering. They expected this organization to provide the required software testing expertise to deliver high quality product to market in time. At the same time to work within the constraints of the company.
The first step involved Knowledge transfer from the customer. Using flow-charts and use-cases we got customer’s concurrence on our understanding of all modules and the interfaces of each module with others. Next, we used STEM™ Behavior Stimuli (BeST) technique to design test cases, module-wise. To increase the depth in testing we applied boundary value analysis technique, Equivalence class technique and Domain specific special value techniques. We also increased the breadth of testing by adding scenarios for different type of tests based on requirements under focus. We also identified module level interfaces to other modules to design end-to-end test scenarios.
We jumpstarted customer’s QA. Institutionalizing our test engineering practices within the organization, led to on-time launch of product thereby boosting the stakeholder confidence in the quality of the product and hence the investment.