One of the major hurdles in promoting quality as a continuous process is a brittle infrastructure. The lack of automation, repeatability, or consistency will degrade any quality initiative that the organization intends to deploy.
Parasoft is an expert in SDLC automation. The Parasoft Services team provides assessments, blueprint services, and deployments for your SDLC processes and systems, including:
Source control (Subversion, Serena Dimensions, CVS, etc.)
System data will be aggregated and correlated through Parasoft Concerto to deliver a comprehensive view of your development processes.
[+] Software Quality Assurance
Parasoft delivers a vast array of software quality assurance services. These practices are structured to take advantage of automation while delivering on current testing goals.
The scope of services includes:
Improved quality practices
Development policy creation and deployment
QA policy creation and deployment
Code/test assessment
Test optimization
Test case or test plan creation
[+] Process Visibility and Control
SDLC quality metrics are fragmented across key systems such as requirements, build, and source control management. Parasoft aggregates and correlates this system data through Parasoft Concerto, delivering a comprehensive view of your development processes.
With process measurement in place, Parasoft adds our 20 years of experience to assist your organization to make credible process improvement gains. The result is visibility that improves an organization’s ability to deliver quality software and to continually increase productivity.
[+] Development Infrastructure Monitoring
Parasoft can help your organization ensure the proper setup and continued operation of your automated infrastructure—without distracting your team members or impeding their productivity. With Parasoft infrastructure experts managing the maintenance details, your organization can rest assured that the infrastructure evolves to support the organization’s changing needs, suspicious trends are promptly identified and resolved, and system failures do not cause noticeable downtime.
The service covers remote maintenance of the automated testing and reporting infrastructure. In addition to setting up your projects in this infrastructure, Parasoft proactively monitors it to identify potential problems as they emerge. When possible, we resolve infrastructure and process issues remotely and unobtrusively. If problems require your attention (e.g., developers added code that broke the builds and prevented testing, the number of reported problems spiked or dipped abnormally), we alert you and offer recommendations on how to proceed. Additionally, we take preventative measures to ensure that system failures or data corruption do not cause downtime.
How can this service benefit your organization?
Leverage our extensive infrastructure expertise: Parasoft consultants have extensive experience working with infrastructure components ranging from build systems, to bug tracking systems, to requirements management systems. From this experience, they have developed best practices for optimizing each component and effectively integrating the different components in a wide range of environments.
Establish flexible, reusable build processes: Organizations typically waste a considerable amount of time configuring and maintaining builds. Moreover, lessons learned from building one project are usually not applied to other projects, which are all built in different ways. Parasoft will standardize build processes across your projects. This results in flexible, reusable build processes that your team can maintain if desired.
Minimize downtime caused by change: Ensure that know-how, processes, and essential data are not lost in a dynamic environment. System failures, employee turnover, employee absences, and so forth can all result in significant downtime. Parasoft minimizes this risk by converting employees’ know-how into automated repeatable processes, and by regularly backing up the files and data needed to ensure the continued operation of these processes.
Know that problems are not being overlooked: Parasoft provides weekly checklists based on monitoring results, as well comprehensive monthly reports that cover all activities. Without this careful monitoring and reporting, issues such as build failures, test failures, and unusual trends might be overlooked.
[+] Automated Defect Prevention
With 20 years of experience helping 58% of the Fortune 500 companies implement a broad range of validation and verification practices, Parasoft knows what it takes to establish a sustainable, repeatable, and predictable quality process.
Parasoft engineered a process for ingraining quality tasks across the SDLC in a way that improves rather than impedes productivity—as well as an automated infrastructure to drive this process. This methodology is known as Automated Defect Prevention (ADP), and it is described in detail in the book Automated Defect Prevention: Best Practices in Software Management by Parasoft CEO Adam Kolawa and Dorota Huizinga (Wiley-IEEE, 2007).
ADP provides a practical approach to software development and management that makes quality a continuous process throughout the software development lifecycle. ADP can be applied to any team, regardless of its structure, projects, or development method.
The ADP methodology features the following principles:
Establishment of Infrastructure "Build a strong foundation through integration of people and technology"
Application of General Best Practices "Learn from the mistakes of others"
Customization of Best Practices "Learn from your own mistakes"
Measurement and Tracking of Project Status "Understand the past and present to make decisions about the future"
Automation "Let the computer do it"
Incremental Implementation of ADP’s Practices and Policies "Move carefully to minimize resistance and increase the chance of success"
