Quality white paper

Taking a Professional Approach to Application Quality Management

Software applications running on complex IT infrastructures automate critical business processes for enterprises across the globe and across all industries. These applications play a key role in daily business activities, from tracking revenue and payments, to monitoring sales cycles and controlling inventory levels. Because applications are so important to enterprises, they must be reliable and free of faults in order to minimize the risk of unplanned system downtime.

Managing the quality of key business applications is imperative for enterprise
agility. Without reliable systems, companies cannot respond quickly to customer
needs or competitive pressures. Yet IT organizations face many challenges as they work to ensure that IT applications and infrastructure meet business needs. These challenges include managing time to market pressures, mitigating the risk of faulty systems, managing application costs, maintaining compliance, coping with complex IT stacks, and optimizing in-house and offshore resources.
This white paper looks at each of these challenges and argues for a rigorous,
professional approach to application testing and quality assurance (QA) that
consists of the following integrated elements:
ƒ
  • A testing methodology that provides a detailed roadmap on how to optimizethe tradeoff between testing spend and risk control
  • A broad set of tools for test automation, capturing user experience, and monitoring the entire application stack
  • ƒResources with deep expertise in the testing methodology and tools to supportyour business and application quality needs.

With a professional approach to application testing, IT leaders can deliver reliable software systems at low levels of cost and risk.