Trust But Verify

Software quality – correctness, robustness, performance, maintainability and other aspects that measure value of a system – is critical to IT investment. Unfortunately, most development groups lack the training, discipline, and tools to consistently produce good results. Quality is too often the first casualty of cut budgets, fixed schedules, and limited resources. Many organizations try to fix this problem by focusing on the development process. The problem is that process is not enough. An effective quality assurance process will also evaluate on the delivered software, and apply a rigorous standard to prevent defects in requirements or implementation.

Services

Our quality assurance team can support a mission-critical project or CMMI process areas as part of an overall quality initiative. We can provide a team for one-time project or work on a monthly retainer for a client.

• Evaluation of an operational system
• Evaluation of a vendor-delivered application
• Monitoring of product quality for insource or outsource projects
• Recommendations on performance, portability, or life cycle investments
• Assessment of methods and tools used by a development group
• Implementation of a continuous integration and testing environment

Powerful Tool Set

Quoin has created a highly effective tool set and process for quality assurance. Our tools support collection of metrics for code size, dependency, static, and dynamic analysis. We currently support code implemented in C, C++, and Java. In addition, our quality assurance services team can support applications built in PHP, Ruby on Rails, and other languages.

• Tools for code size and dependency analysis
• Tools for static and dynamic analysis
• Continuous integration environment
• Automated build and regression testing
• Support for C, C++, Java, and other languages

We will soon release a set of web-based tools for analysis of specific modules.

Deliverables

Quoin can provide a range of deliverables to support a specific project or ongoing quality assurance initiatives for a client. We will work with a client to produce the most important and useful information on a system.

• Automated test suite
• Report on code defects
• Report on resource usage
• Report on performance
• Code changes to fix defects or improve performance
• Complete test environment and tool set
• Portable (USB-based) development environment and QA tool set

Case Study

Quoin recently complete a performance optimization effort for a large retail client. Our project team isolated a set of mission-critical modules, and performed an extensive analysis of the code. The code base was over 175,000 effective lines of C/C++ code from an operational point-of-sale system. We implemented specific test cases for key processes, and used our tool set to identify the defects. The result was a significant improvement in overall performance, which will allow the client to defer a multi-million dollar hardware upgrade for its field systems.

• Our team identified 18,000 severe defects
• We rapidly fixed the severe defects
• We identified a serious logic error for remediation
• The project achieved a performance improvement of 53% – 76%