Username:	Password:

Learn 5 ways to cut test and verification costs...

In this business climate you need to cut costs and improve the quality of your products, all at the same time.

Wow — now that's a challenge!

As engineers and program managers, we are trained to view cost and quality as two opposing forces.  But what if you could accomplish both goals simultaneously?

Can you imagine explaining to your boss, or to the CEO, that you slashed development time and cost of the product...

Then imagine their reaction when you say you also improved the product's quality!

Do you think he or she would be impressed?

If you unlock these 5 secrets, you will see...

• Immediate and positive impacts on your product...
• Overall reduction in development time...and
• Drastically lower development costs.

In a nutshell:

1. Understand Customer Needs
2. Prioritize Requirements and Test Cases
3. Get Expert Advice
4. Use Standardized Test Cases
5. Automate Regression Tests

Curious to know what all of that means?  Then read on...

1. Understand Your Customer's Needs

Have you ever complained to one of your colleagues:

"You know, I just don't think that our customer really knows what they want."

Admit it.  We all guilty of saying that at one time or another.

Want to know a secret? 

Our customers know exactly what they want.  They just don't have the tools to put their desires and needs into requirements.

The trick is to learn how to understand our customer needs and to turn them into requirements.

A revolutionary article published in 1984 tells us that the way to unlock your customer's explicit and implicit desires and needs is through the use of carefully crafted questions.

The questions are formulated in pairs:

1. The first question seeks to understand the customer's reaction to the presence of a given feature.
2. The second question seeks to understand the customer's reaction to the absence of the given feature.

Such a scenario would point to a "delighter" or "more is better" feature. (fig 1.)

If you ask questions such as these of your customers, you'll soon discover that some features matter to your customers while other features do not matter at all.

What a revelation — that means that if you don't develop or include certain features, your customers won't care!  This also means that you don't need to spend the money developing these unnecessary features!

Think of how much money you can save if you simply do not develop unnecessary features?

We feel so strongly that it is important not to spend the time, energy, and money to develop unnecessary features, that we integrated KANO fields into DiagZ.

When entering requirements into DiagZ, you can label your requirements as either:

1. Delighter
2. More is Better
3. Must Have
4. Don't Care

In doing so, DiagZ users can quickly tag requirements while they are being entered and then prioritize development accordingly.

2. Prioritize Requirements and Test Cases

If you've ever read Steven Covey's work, you know that he's a big fan of prioritizing.  In fact, he uses a term called the "80/20" or "pareto" principle often in his work.

The basic concept, is that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes.

In other words, if you focus your energy on the most important 20%, you will have an 80% impact.

That's a 4:1 effectiveness ratio.  Don't you wish you had those amazing odds at a casino?

Now lets apply this to product development.

If you consider the importance of a requirement, you can prioritize your requirements according to the 80/20 principle as follows:

1. Critical
2. High
3. Medium
4. Low
5. Don't Care

Critical requirement MUST be implemented correctly in order to achieve 80% of the results that you seek with your product.  Similarly, in order to achieve 90% of your product goals, you need correctly implement the High priority requirements also.

Thereafter, you get into the details where the devil lies.  Generally, as you get closer to the tail-end of your project, the medium and low requirements come into question — and they should!  These are the requirements that have the least impact on your customers.

DiagZ encourages the use of this prioritization scheme through its proprietary built-in prioritization system.

When combined with the Kano system for understanding your customer needs, you can develop a very powerful story to determine which requirements should be implemented and debugged...and which can be dropped.

And listen to this...

If you drop the RIGHT requirements, you also remove the costs associated with implementing and debugging them. Furthermore, by reducing the total number of requirements to those that your customers really care about, you can focus your energy on the most important features and thereby cut unnecessary distractions that would otherwise plague your development team.

3. Seek Expert Advice

Let's face it, we are not all experts at everything — though most of us would like to be.

Wouldn't it be great if you could immediately excel at anything you try?

The reality is, that becoming an expert at something is a process.  It takes both knowledge and practice. But that doesn't mean you can't get a head-start.

In this industry, the best head-start often comes in the form of expert advice from others who have tackled similar development projects in the past.

These people have made the common mistakes already and can help you avoid them.  In the hardware development industry, these experts come in the form of consultants, courses, tools, etc.

The hard part is finding the right expert for your specific need.

For instance, if you have a need for expert advice on a specific technology, a good place to start is often the organization that manages the technology.  For instance, people interested in Bluetooth wireless technology can go to www.bluetooth.com and www.bluetooth.org to learn more about it.

While this is a good start, it is often insufficient.

The next step is usually to seek education through specialized courses such as those offered by Mindshare and other training companies.

This too may be insufficient.

That's where consultants come-in.  Companies such as The Quality Factory have specialists that can help you avoid many of the pitfalls in a typical high-volume product development project.

These consultants are often worth their weight in gold because they know what works and what doesn't and help you avoid getting trapped by unnecessary and costly mistakes.

4. Use Standardized Test Cases

But wouldn't it be great if you could take the knowledge that has been acquired by consultants, and apply it to your project directly?

Well, now you can!

When you use DiagZ, you have access to project templates that have been meticulously developed by the experts at The Quality Factory for specific products such as Bluetooth wireless headsets and USB Mice.

These templates incorporate the typical requirements and their associated test cases into a package that you can simply install, adapt to your specific project, and use as-is.

What makes these templates so powerful?  Not only do they take the knowledge that we've acquired through years of product development to help you get a jumpstart on your project, but they also use a technique we call "the technique of standardized test cases" to manage your testing strategy.

This method of writing test cases follows a similar principle to that used when writing-up issues:

1. Establish precise setup steps
2. Identify the trigger mechanism for the test case
3. Describe the expected results

This is how such a test case might look:

Notice the following:

• Test steps are clearly numbered
• Expected results exist for each test step
• Sample data is provided where applicable to aid the tester

By using this unambiguous technique, Quality Assurance, Design Verification, and Test Engineers can clearly communicate to Testers the precise factors that lead to specific expected results.

This unambiguous test case documentation technique reduces unnecessary testing costs and back-and forth discussions between Development and Verification teams throughout the project, and is part of the DiagZ tool architecture.

5. Automate Regression Tests

Let's face it, none of us like repeating a test case over, and over again!

After the first few times through a test case, most of us lose focus and start to execute the test case on autopilot.

This is a problem because it leads to unnecessary mistakes as we stop following the explicit test steps and instead rely on our memory to execute the test case correctly.

Thankfully, there are options.

DiagZ enables engineers and technicians to automate repetitive test cases by providing hooks that facilitate testing with third-party test case managers.

While this is great for some test cases, others require a hardware interface that can actuate buttons, output voltages, and capture the impacts by measuring voltages and the state of IO lines.

It is precisely for this reason that we developed the DataDyno.

This simple tool enables engineers to rapidly automate repetitive tests without the expense of a complex test case development environment.

In-fact, the tool is so straightforward, that anybody with a text editor, Microsoft® Excel®, or other similar tools can rapidly create a test case profile that can be executed at the touch of a button.

By using tools such as the DataDyno, and third-party tie-ins to DiagZ, hardware engineers can now execute test cases and gather results quickly and efficiently without the programming effort previously associated with test case automation.

Applying These Techniques

At the onset of any product development, use the 80/20 principle right away by applying these techniques.

Take an hour, or even a day if you have-to, and together with your key team members, establish a strategy for project success by first establishing your customers' needs.

This may involve brainstorming, or building a Kano survey, or simply using the Kano technique and what you already know about your customer. Identify which requirements are "Delighters", which are "More is Better" requirements, which are "Must Have" requirements, and which requirements can be flagged as "Don't Care" requirements.

Then, capture these requirements in a spreadsheet, or better yet in DiagZ.

Next — prioritize your requirements based on your customer and business needs.

Be selective here.  You can always bump up the priority of your requirements, but if you set every requirement as a critical or high priority requirement, you will soon find yourself torn between conflicting priorities.

If you haven't already done so, identify which requirements you can implement and/or validate without seeking expert advice.  Where you have the knowledge and/or expertise, assign these requirements to the appropriate team member.

Where additional expert advice would be beneficial, assign the requirement to the program manager or to somebody who will be responsible for obtaining the training and/or who has the authority to hire a consultant.

Or better yet, acquire templates and tools that jumpstart your project!

Now, you and your team should be ready to start building test cases that adequately cover each critical and high priority requirement.

We recommend building these test cases as early as possible in the development of the project in order to validate each feature as it is developed.  This avoids falling into a waterfall model where all of the requirements have been implemented but have not yet been fully validated.

Don't forget to keep these test cases standardized.  It will help your team as you progress down the development path.

Lastly, as you discover that test cases are being repeated frequently, invest in basic test case automation.  This could be as simple as using the DataDyno to execute a test sequence or as complex as using elaborate 3rd party tools and highly integrated test case automation environments.

We're convinced that by using these techniques judiciously, you will not only reduce your overall development costs, but will also cut development time, and improve the quality of your end-product.

The Quality Factory is pleased to announce our new monthly newsletter!

Through this special newsletter, you'll also learn new ways to:

• Cut development costs
• Prioritize team efforts
• Create a culture of quality at your company

The secret tips and tricks in this newsletter will help you both improve the quality of your products and services AND reduce your development costs.

... and receive timely tips on improving your products and driving your costs down!.
You’ll even get a coupon for 5% off any Requirements EValuator product purchase.