Service Overview Managed Testing

Managed Testing Services

AppLabs Managed Testing Services are offered as a seamless extension to your in-house IT and business testing capabilities. We work closely with you to tailor a program of support which meets your needs and ensures your systems achieve the quality levels demanded by your customers. Our services range from supplementing in-house skills through to outsourcing the entire QA function to an offshore facility. We provide complete support to help you meet the demands of your business and are careful to recommend solutions that do not impact upon your ability to deliver. Most importantly we supplement the in-house QA function, recognizing gaps and providing a response to the challenges of delivering new business systems. AppLabs services extend much further than staff augmentation. A key factor in any engagement is the continuous improvement and the development of your own staff. We will work with you to apply improvements to your systems lifecycle, minimizing the cost of testing whilst at the same time optimizing the process to improve the quality of delivered systems. Working with AppLabs will add flexibility and know-how to your QA and testing capability, but most importantly it will ensure your business stays on track.

Service Overview Managed Testing

Operational Acceptance Testing

Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT) is becoming critically important to organizations that deliver and maintain complete software systems and complex IT infrastructures. In general, OAT addresses the non-functional attributes of a system. With the specific exclusions of performance and security, which we consider to be areas of specialty in their own right, OAT concentrates on such areas as maintainability, reliability, recoverability, installability, compatibility and conformance, to name a few. What characterizes many of the operational testing domains is their lack of simple pass/fail criteria that are expected in the user testing domains. Additionally, operational testing is closely bound to the implementation technologies, software architectures and vendor products used to deliver the software application capability to the business users. In order to support and develop our capabilities in OAT, AppLabs software testing consultants are drawn from all areas of discipline within IT. As well as being trained in our CMMI Level 5 certified software testing methodology, they bring with them, and continue to develop, their skills and experience of major hardware and software vendors products, services and major corporate operational IT methodologies such as ITIL and COBIT. Over and above the skills required for functional testing, there are two significant additional areas of capability that must be addressed for successful OAT. Firstly, in contrast to typical user testing, operational testing requires that the test environment(s) is of sufficient similarity to the final operational environment. This ensures the testing is a valid expression of the actual future operational behavior. Without a deep understanding of the technology deployed, it would not be possible to assure that this condition is met. Secondly, the raw data from operability tests may be expressed in statistical form e.g. mean time to recovery, or as a point on a continuously variable scale e.g. network utilization. It is important the measurements that will be gathered are mapped onto a discrete scale that informs the project of a pass or fail condition. Furthermore, failures must be able to be mapped onto a more detailed severity and priority definition so that they can be entered into the appropriate defect tracking or incident management process. As IT governance becomes more important and pressures on CIOs increase to deliver more value with less resources, OAT will continue to help deliver the required operational improvements in IT delivery. Operational IT costs account for 70-80% of most organizations entire IT budget. Every system or software application that is deployed without proof of operational integrity is another drain on the discretionary IT spend that could be supporting technology enabled business innovation. At worst, a system that appears to deliver the business users requirements can actually become a financial liability to the business as the operational costs exceed the profitability of the business unit that the system was designed to support. AppLabs experience in OAT, across all major industry segments and technology platforms, can help you measure, manage and control the operational attributes of the software projects you are expected to support and maintain. Ultimately this helps you deliver an enhanced contribution to your organizations bottom line results.

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