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Quality Management at ScienceSoft
Quality is deeply rooted in our culture. We don’t just talk about quality – we continuously invest in it and prove it in each project. We prioritize quality at all levels: from top management establishing the quality strategy to PMO building and managing quality processes and every employee working towards the best quality output.
8 Pillars of Our Approach to Quality Management
Quality-centered leadership
To ensure the company-wide commitment to quality, ScienceSoft’s leaders:
- Establish, maintain and improve our quality strategy and communicate our values at all company levels.
- Set clear and realistic quality expectations that guide our processes and teams.
- Ensure that managers at all levels are strong examples of quality- and result-oriented people in the organization.
Skilled, motivated, and result-driven people
We are a team of professionals who are true enthusiasts of what we do and continuously perfect our skills. We foster our employees’ commitment to quality from day one:
- Our multi-step hiring process includes thorough technical interviews and soft skills assessments.
- We have an established onboarding process to make sure new hires quickly absorb our culture and processes.
- Technical talents are pre-vetted to fit specific projects.
- We create a fertile working environment and organize tailored professional trainings.
- Managers promote healthy competition among employees and share constructive feedback to encourage in-company growth.
Value-focused collaboration
ScienceSoft believes that productive, transparent, and friendly collaboration with clients and contractors is a key to achieving quality goals.
- We outline a collaboration strategy for each project to guarantee effective and uninterrupted communication with our clients.
- We promote transparency, so collaboration with us is based on tailored and traceable KPI systems.
Transparent and effectively managed processes
Our customers always know what they get throughout all stages of our cooperation.
- We meticulously plan, document, monitor, and continuously improve our processes on the project, department, and company levels.
- We pay great attention to risk management to maximize the project output while meeting quality standards and budget expectations.
Commitment to compliance
Our clients can rest assured that all industry-specific and internal corporate standards and regulations are met.
- Our solid approach to the safety of our customers’ information is proved by ISO 27001 certificate.
- In development projects, we create software compliant with HIPAA/HITECH, PCI Software Security Framework, SOC1 and SOC2, SOX, GDPR (for the EU), ZATCA (for Saudi Arabia), and other standards and regulations.
- We have experienced compliance consultants on board, and our employees can undergo additional training to meet compliance requirements for a specific project.
Data-driven decision-making
We promote a data-driven culture throughout the company, which favorably influences the quality of our teams’ output. We make sure our people know how to get actionable insights from data to:
- Correctly interpret the work results.
- Promptly find improvement opportunities.
- Analyze how their work correlates with colleagues’ work and the project objectives.
Customer focus
Our customers’ needs and satisfaction make up the focal point of ScienceSoft’s business strategy. To ensure we stay tuned with our clients’ needs, we:
- Build open and unique communication with each customer.
- Continuously elicit, analyze and act on our customers’ changing needs.
- Communicate the needs and preferences to our employees and organize necessary trainings.
- Introduce new practices and tailor our processes and work habits to our customers’ changing needs.
- Measure and monitor our customers’ satisfaction and take action to maintain it at the highest level.
Continuous improvement
To continuously improve our quality management processes and policies in line with our clients’ changing needs and compliance environments, we:
- Constantly analyze our internal procedures.
- Conduct retrospectives.
- Perform internal audits, including ISO 9001 and ISO 13485 audits.
Why Choose a Quality-First Company?
You can count on smooth cooperation and value-driving outcomes. ScienceSoft guarantees:
Tangible value
Depending on the project, our clients can get:
- 20-40% shorter time to release for new software.
- 20-50% increased applications’ ROI due to effective support and maintenance.
- 90%+ user satisfaction score for help desk services.
- +30-200% to process automation in digital transformation initiatives.
Predictable results
You get what you count on due to:
- Healthy project processes.
- Professional and motivated teams.
- Effective communication between ScienceSoft, your teams, and stakeholders.
- Professional risk management.
Project cost optimization
We set quality standards from the very first contact and maintain them throughout the project. You get:
- Eliminated risks of rework.
- Only planned expenditures.
- No risks of changing a vendor halfway.
Why Choose a Quality-First Company?
ScienceSoft proved to be a professional service provider from the outset. We appreciate their proactive approach and ability to suggest improvements to a prospective solution on both architectural and business levels. We know we can always rely on ScienceSoft’s various competencies when our clients require quality software which would facilitate their business success.
Mikhail AnfimauSenior Solution Architect, Leo Burnett
ScienceSoft proved to be a professional service provider from the outset. We appreciate their proactive approach and ability to suggest improvements to a prospective solution on both architectural and business levels. We know we can always rely on ScienceSoft’s various competencies when our clients require quality software which would facilitate their business success.
Mikhail AnfimauSenior Solution Architect, Leo Burnett
ScienceSoft proved to be a professional service provider from the outset. We appreciate their proactive approach and ability to suggest improvements to a prospective solution on both architectural and business levels. We know we can always rely on ScienceSoft’s various competencies when our clients require quality software which would facilitate their business success.
Mikhail AnfimauSenior Solution Architect, Leo Burnett
ScienceSoft proved to be a professional service provider from the outset. We appreciate their proactive approach and ability to suggest improvements to a prospective solution on both architectural and business levels. We know we can always rely on ScienceSoft’s various competencies when our clients require quality software which would facilitate their business success.
Mikhail AnfimauSenior Solution Architect, Leo Burnett
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See How We Manage Quality at Every Stage of Our Cooperation
ScienceSoft provides a variety of IT services, from digital transformation consulting to development, testing, and help desk outsourcing. We tailor our quality management procedures to the service nature and specifics.
Below, as an example, we provide a close look at quality management throughout all steps of our typical Scrum-based software development project.
Inception
ScienceSoft’s experienced business managers and project managers lay the foundation for the success of the entire initiative by discovering clients’ needs and planning future development activities. In particular, our clients get:
- A clear picture of the project costs, future investments, and ROI.
- A software development plan corresponding to their needs, deliverables, time frames, and budget.
- Compliance and risk mitigation plans.
- Pre-vetted project team members according to the clients’ needs.
Elaboration
To ensure an effective development process, a project manager and a quality assurance (QA) manager define project milestones and KPIs that will allow stakeholders to track the project’s progress and us – to continuously optimize and improve our efforts.
The QA manager creates a high-level test plan with the defined testing activities that will help ensure the software under development is of high quality and fully meets the requirements.
Construction
This is the stage where we build the solution. Each software development iteration based on Scrum methodology runs according to our quality management principles, lasts for 2-4 weeks, and includes the following cycles:
3.1. Architecture, UX and UI Design
ScienceSoft’s experienced architects design high-performing, reliable, and scalable architectures, microservices-based, cloud-native, and service-oriented architectures.
The UX researchers study the target audience, its needs and behavior, while the UI designers create prototypes aimed at high user engagement, retention, and ease of use.
3.2. Coding
High-quality code is the foundation of high-quality software. ScienceSoft’s developers follow unified code rules and specific rules for certain programming technologies, as well as regularly perform unit testing and code reviews (ad hoc reviews, pair programming, walkthrough, etc.).
We promote the automation of development, test, and production environment configuration. We effectively manage Infrastructure as a Code and apply unit testing for it. This helps minimize infrastructure-related risks and ensure software performs well not only in the development and test environments but also in production.
3.3. Testing
ScienceSoft performs rigorous testing reasonably allocating manual and automated efforts and adhering to the following approaches:
- Detailed test-related documentation based on the internal standards following ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-3:2021.
- Shift-left approach that involves moving testing activities closer to the beginning of a sprint or iteration, regular code reviews, and unit testing. Unit tests are cost-effective and help check the key functions work as intended, whereas UI tests help validate various scenarios, including complex ones. To reduce testing costs, we apply a feasible ratio of UI and unit testing with a bigger share of the latter.
- Defining a feasible amount of test automation based on the specifics of each project (Integrated Manual and Automated Testing approach). This way, we ensure the highest quality and minimize testing costs in the long run.
- Manual acceptance and ad-hoc exploratory testing to validate every software feature.
- Collecting, evaluating, and analyzing testing KPIs and test results, performing additional testing if necessary.
Construction
This is the stage where we build the solution. Each software development iteration based on Scrum methodology runs according to our quality management principles, lasts for 2-4 weeks, and includes the following cycles:
3.1. Architecture, UX and UI Design
ScienceSoft’s experienced architects design high-performing, reliable, and scalable architectures, microservices-based, cloud-native, and service-oriented architectures.
The UX researchers study the target audience, its needs and behavior, while the UI designers create prototypes aimed at high user engagement, retention, and ease of use.
Transition
This is the stage where ScienceSoft provides a build or ready software to the customer. Clients benefit from our clear project documentation and KPI-based quality summary reports that describe the overall build quality, a test result report with the testing progress, defects validation results, and invested efforts.
Production
During software support and maintenance, the customer can be sure that the developed software remains of high quality over time, evolves according to the changing business needs, and that users are satisfied with it. For that, ScienceSoft’s team:
- Maintains effective communication with a client’s business and technical stakeholders.
- Recommends and implements adjustments, changes, and new functionality via CI/CD pipelines.
- Performs testing of the new or changed functionality and runs regression testing.
Quality is Only Real When Measured: KPIs We Use
We assess our projects’ health and drive improvements based on tailored sets of KPIs we track and analyze.
- Project health score – an aggregated metric based on the weighted score of all related KPIs.
- Percentage of outsourcing personnel costs to total costs.
- Percentage of outsourcing personnel hours to total time budget.
With consideration to a project, lesser external involvement tends to decrease associated risks. Nevertheless, comparing external costs with external hours lets us set the base for comparison with internal resources and increase control over outsourcing personnel.
- Actual effort in hours to budget – general KPI for project health measurement.
- Project management effort in hours to budget – overall project management efforts.
- Features waiting in the backlog longer than the deadline – a control point that, ideally, should always equal zero.
- The total amount of “rework” time – basic performance KPI.
- Timeline shift to plan – general KPI for Project Health measurement.
Basic quality KPIs:
- Test coverage and actuality.
- Total number of change requests.
- Percentage of deliverables accepted in the first UAT phase.
Additionally:
- Code quality – KPI based on code reviews or scanner results done on a regular basis.
- Defects count per project/iteration/functional module (grouped by severity) – the ratio of critical defects to total defects count shows the current product quality state. If the ratio decreases, then product quality improves.
- Defects count per project/iteration/functional module (grouped by priority) – allows analyzing total defects impact on business value.
- Testing effectiveness per project/iteration – (Defects count found by the test team / Total defects count)*100%. Can be measured after the final release or after a single iteration.
- Defects found in UAT – number of defects by severity: critical, major, minor, etc.
- Rejected defects ratio (per project) – the ratio of rejected defects to reported defects shows the quality of defect localization and the reporting procedure.
- Executed test cases count grouped by status vs. actual test cases count (per project, last result) – overview of product tests’ intensity and volume.
- Requirements covered with test cases vs. the total number of requirements – overview of test coverage.
- Reopened defects rate – the ratio of reopened defects to resolved defects shows the quality of the project stabilization procedure.
- Defects “need info” rate – the quantity of defects, set by the development team in “need info” status – shows the defects description quality.
KPIs that shows the client’s involvement and related outcomes:
- Customer engagement score.
- Delays with requirements elicitation sessions.
- Delays with UAT.
Additionally:
- Successful project score – score that shows the customer satisfaction with project performance and quality.
- Team satisfaction score – score that shows the customer satisfaction with the project team and its competencies.
- Vulnerabilities found by regular penetration testing.
- Vulnerabilities found by independent penetration testing.
- Known vulnerabilities left open by the end of the month.
- Security incidents.
Security KPIs could be applied to specific projects with special requirements for security as a part of quality control.
With ScienceSoft, Your Project is In Safe Hands
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