- Quality Management Process in Nextway
Nextway's project management methodologies are based on the software project management guidelines stipulated by SEI-CMMI and ISO-9001. Rigorous compliance with these world-class standards ensures a high level of quality in every aspect of Nextway's delivery life cycle.
- Quality Management
The fundamental objective of quality management is to define and meet the quality goals of the project. Project quality goals are defined based on organizational quality goals as well as customer requirements. Since the achievement of project quality goals is directly dependent upon successful defect detection, correction and prevention through reviews, each project goes through the following reviews:
- Requirements Review
- Analysis Review
- Design Review
- Prototype Review
- Test Plan Review
- Test Case Review
- Code Review
- Test Results Review
- 3rd party software evaluation review, where applicable
There may be additional reviews introduced into the Quality Assurance Plan of a project, depending upon project size, complexity, customer requirements or other factors. Each of these reviews is conducted based upon a review methodology, which states how the review is to be carried out. For example, each review may involve multiple iterations that vary in scope and is conducted by different project stakeholders.
Typically there are three kinds of review:
- Peer-to-Peer review (intra team)
- External review (extra-team, done by representative of organizational Quality Assurance group)
- Customer / User Acceptance reviews (extra-organization)
- Quality Audit Methodology
For project audit, Nextway nominates a trained Quality Reviewer for every project that in turn is responsible for process compliance in the project. Nextway audits every logical stage of the project—start-up, work product, delivery and completion.
The following audits/reviews ensure process compliance and high-quality deliverables.
- Project Start-up Audit: This is done at the beginning of the project to ensure that the start-up process is implemented effectively. Quality Reviewer reviews plan documents.
- Project Work Product Audit: This is done when work products are produced by the project before they are used in the subsequent phases of development.
- Process Audit: This is done for process compliance. This is done based on sampling.
- Project Delivery Inspection: This is done before a project delivery to the customer.
- Project Completion Audit: This is done at the end of the project.
- Project Metrics Audit: This is done to verify if data collection, metrics and metrics analysis are carried out as per process defined for the project and if quality goals are adhered to.
- Configuration Audit: This audit is carried out to verify if the configuration management activities are carried out as defined in the Configuration Plan of the project.
- Software product or service conformity
- Development progress
- Process effectiveness
Quality indicators and metrics system are used to determine,
Benchmarks for different indicators are defined at organization level, based on the past experiences of projects, along with the tailoring guidelines to derive benchmarks at project level. Projects define the quality goals, collect and analyze data and take corrective actions wherever there are deviations from the defined benchmarks. The measurements include defects, Size of the software and Effort taken for various software development activities.
Wherever possible, metrics consolidation is done at organization level. Organization level benchmarks are modified and the original assumptions are revalidated, if the overall indicators show frequent deviations from the benchmarks established. Access to the data is appropriately controlled and the data is used for measuring and monitoring the performance of the process and not that of individuals.
