At IQ Software their product was a very sophisticated software application. It was designed to run on over 20 different operating system variants (Unix, Windows, Vax and many others). This was before the internet was much more than an email and data exchange platform, which meant that the software had to actually run on many different hardware platforms. This level of cross platform portability required that it be a highly sophisticated product. This also meant the product had a fairly high level of “bugs” reported after product release. Our immediate task was to increase customer satisfaction by lowering the number of bugs that reached the final customer. The problem IQ Software had encountered was the complexity in creating a testing application (software) for every possible environment. Basically this meant they would have to create many different pieces of software. The software they sold plus a “tester” for every possible operating system/hardware variation. Our approach was to create a testing regime that went well beyond current levels without having to create new software for every new release of product.
Conclusion:
- Simplicity. We try to keep all of our solutions as simple as possible. Creating a complex solution can become a whole new problem in itself. We created a solution that was almost completely hardware and operating system independent by staying with an interpreted language. So the single set of code, with very minor and easily understood tweaks could be used on all systems.
- Maintainable. Since their company was in the business of manufacturing software it made a lot of sense to build a product that could be easily maintained by their current staff. So, we chose tools that their personnel were already using. This dramatically lowered their long term costs.
- Quality Training. Delivering a single quality testing product is a very minor part of building an over quality (QA/QC) program. We assisted with development of a QA/QC department. We trained them to use the tools we developed. We also trained them on how to extend the use of those tools in new development.
