The Hyderabad-based Oracle India Development Center, started out as a 10-member team in 1999. Within a short span of four years, the company has ramped up to over 1,000 people and is one of the key sites for Oracle e-business suite development. Given the introduction of multiple product development and activities covering all phases of software  development life cycle, the center decided to establish the quality management system (QMS) by adopting practices from SW-CMM. To effectively institutionalize and continuously improve the processes and quality system, it introduced the concept of virtual software quality assurance (SQA) team.

The SQA Team
The nominated SQA member is allocated a certain portion of her time for performing quality assurance functions. The remaining part of the time is for performing the project activities. The allocated time for the SQA role is anywhere from 15% to 20% of the work time, based on the size of the team, nature of the project, maturity of the project team, number of SQAs etc. This SQA function time is embedded in the project plan and is identified as part of project work.

The nominated SQA member undergoes a series of training sessions in the areas of SQA, quality auditing, metrics and defect prevention before taking over as a member of the team. This role is rotated among team members. The minimum time for which a team member performs the role of SQA is one year. The outgoing SQA transitions the role to the newly nominated SQA. This role rotation of the SQA function gives equal opportunity to team members to bring in new ideas. It also helps in continuously improving the quality processes.

Best Practices
The Virtual SQA team has helped establishing the quality management system. The team has also put forward innovative ideas and implemented a quality portal (knowledge repository) to capture rich experiences of the past. All these are true experiences and live examples of a group that has evolved over the last four years.

In Oracle’s virtual SQA model, project teams nominate one or more team members for performing the SQA role. The virtual SQA team works under the guidance of the central quality lead who reports to the head of e-business applications development division, at the India Development Center

Quality Planning: The SQA, along with project manager of the team, defines the quality plan based on project requirements and the quality management system requirements. To ensure effective planning of the quality system, SQAs have come up with an automated tool that allows scheduling and updating the progress of the quality activities. This tool sends reminders to SQAs and their managers for updating the quality activities progress. Given that SQAs are technical members as well—innovative automation of the work becomes natural.

Quality System Training: SQAs are users of the quality system; training the team ensures very high levels of buy-in and awareness of the quality system.

Education on quality system is not just limited to the training of the team during induction. Each project team meeting has a agenda point devoted to the SQA activities. The SQA discusses the developments on the quality management system with the team. This ensures continual education on quality system and brings the culture of building quality product as a habit. Also, the SQAs post the analysis data in quality portal for future reference of all product teams.

Causal Analysis: Defect prevention is a critical activity for any software development project, more so for the product development teams. In product development companies, each defect is very costly, as it impacts multiple customers across the globe.

Defect data with defect type, subtype and cause-type information is the key input for the causal analysis meeting. Based on the learning from the causal analysis, the SQA and the manager/key members of the team arrive at an action plan. The learning from the causal analysis and the action plan is shared with the team.

Based on the action plan, SQAs might train the team on processes/practice or modify the processes. Previously, these defect data were collected in different formats and data consolidation was a huge task by itself. Then came the development of ‘review tool’ that is used for review of all deliverables at each phase of software development life cycle. Another task is identifying the defects during review time, along with cause type and category. This helps in consolidation of defect data for effectiveness and completeness of the analysis. The SQAs play a major role in implementing this tool through a series of training sessions and team meetings. The SQAs being part of the team has helped in greater ‘buy in’ of the system by the team, and effective rollout.

Internal Quality Audits: The development center has developed an audit framework to perform a periodic health check on the quality system. Two categories of audits are conducted: internal audit (IA) and internal internal audit (IIA).

IA is scheduled by the quality lead and is executed with the help of trained internal auditors. The trained internal auditors’ team comprises a mixture of SQAs and project managers. This gives SQAs an opportunity to understand and appreciate the implementation of quality system in other product groups. This helps in the learning of the best practices while auditing and adopting it to the respective team, if found suitable. The SQAs play a key role in internal audit closure meeting by sharing the experiences of best practices and concerns. This process builds best practice of auditing procedure for the organization. IIA is scheduled and conducted by the SQA of the team with team-specific focus areas.

Introspections: Introspections are conducted with an objective to provide with a structured opportunity to look back at the completed project or at milestones and learn from the same. The team analyses what went wrong, and how the team performed with respect to the stated objectives. The learning from this analysis is documented and an appropriate action plan is chalked out.

Quality Management Reviews (QMRs): These are conducted with the following objectives: 

• Review the implementation of the quality system by the senior management
• Provide a platform for teams to exchange the learning with other teams of similar type of work (development, maintenance, testing, etc).

The SQAs identify the best practices from their teams to share with other teams. The learning identified can be from the new practices piloted/implemented, from audit finding, metrics analyzed or new ideas generated within teams. The SQAs of similar type of work discuss the learning from each team in a pre-QMR SQA meeting. Based on these discussions, the SQAs prepare and make a presentation in the QMR meeting for further discussion with the management and action.

Knowledge Management: Experience of the past projects is the key to success. The SQAs have put good work in this front and deployed ‘quality portal’ that contains information like:

• Processes, guidelines and templates
• Quality plans
• Metrics analysis outcome
• Defect prevention learning

This portal serves as a central repository for quality system. The SQAs play a key role in maintaining the portal by publishing relevant content time-to-time and updating the team about the new items deployed, if any.

Fruits of Labor

The virtual SQA team, being combination of representatives across the product team, gives diversified view on each process deployment and brings in new ideas to improve the usage of the system.

Learnings from the SQA Model A look at what one needs for the successful implementation of a SQA model: Get the right SQA on board: Selecting the right SQA team is a very important determinant in the successful implementation of this model. The Oracle India Development Center did a joint study by quality lead and HR representative on the functioning of the SQA role, and key criteria were defined for the team member’s selection Provide adequate training: Training in all aspects of SQA is imperative. Also, senior management must be involved and the management perspective needs to be shared with the team. Further, SQAs have to be adequately trained on auditing skills, metrics analysis methods, and defect prevention techniques Budget adequate time: For the nominated team members to perform the SQA role effectively, the required time with a reasonable buffer has to be allocated. This was done to ensure that SQAs carry out the SQA activities with the needed commitment, and performing the SQA role does not affect the project deliverables Appraise SQAs for the role: Managers have to work with SQAs in defining the key result areas for the SQA role. Managers and SQAs have periodic one-on-ones to review performance based on the KRA set

In this virtual SQA model, SQAs, while executing quality assurance activities, constantly look for opportunities to automate. Since the SQAs are technical members as well, building such utility or rolling out of new tool becomes easier.

The SQA work time is budgeted in the project plans and treated as part of the project. This helps in setting precedence among the team to look at quality activities as part of the project, and not as two parallel entities.

Given that, SQA is part of the product team and an active user of the system helps in effective implementation of the system. To review the effectiveness of the virtual SQA team, a survey is conducted across organizations covering the project managers, SQAs and team members. Survey results show that ‘Virtual SQA team’ has wider acceptance across managers, SQAs, and the team members, and results in an effective implementation of the quality system.

Another important result is that it helps the team member to build good managerial skills and to become a well rounded software professional. The SQA role brings the value addition in grooming the member in important managerial skills like planning, tracking, people management, multitasking, problem solving, and presentation skills. An interesting observation is that 30% of the current home-grown managers were SQAs.

Challenges

The challenges faced in implementing the model and the way those challenges were addressed are detailed below.

• Some of the nominated SQAs perceive that their contribution to the project as a practitioner is appreciated more than their work on SQA function. To address this perception, project managers and the SQAs work on defining the KRA for the SQA role. The manager and the SQA have regular one-on-one in which the manager reviews the performance of the SQA and emphasizes the criticality of the role.
• Some of the project managers perceive that planning for 20% of the time of the nominated member for the SQA role is resulting in unnecessary reduction in available practitioner time for the project.
• The senior management addresses this issue by emphasizing the need to invest the time in carrying out the SQA function. The senior management also helps the managers in using the SQA as an important role in effective execution of the project.
• Given the matrix organizational structure, at times one faces a challenge of convincing some of the counterparts at headquarters on the need to budget time of the project team member acting as SQA for the SQA role.
  
  The senior management addresses this issue by discussing and demonstrating the benefits of having SQA from within the project team.

SY Shenoy and Mahesh Badimi
Shenoy is director, HRMS development, and Badami is senior quality consultant at Oracle India Development Center        
Source: QAI, organizers of the SPEG 2003 Conference. www.qaiindia.com

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