Usability

What is Usability?

Usability is a term used to define the ease with which user can interact with the software or website in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability is very much measurable and should be used to assess the user interface during the entire SDLC.

Why usability is important?

Usability helps designers and developers (especially BAs) to improve the user experience with the software, some of the user benefits from usability are:

• Improve understanding the product and reduce learning curve
• Increases user satisfaction and trust in the product
• Improve speed and accuracy in recording information
• Improve rapid recovery from error and invalid data inputs
• Easy to remember

Define conventions and best practice to improve general usability for your organization; use this to evaluate every product shipped out of the door.
Investigate and define usability for every age group, demographic, ethnographic or any other category of your users, this is very important as every group of people interacts with software is different way, you can achieve this by running focus group meetings and in-depth interviews.

Tools
Usability is a concept and as such you don’t need any tools to implement it, but there are plenty of usability software which can be used to gather, collate and present information and resources about issues related to usability in software or website design. One tool I can recommend is Morae from TechSmith you can download a free trial from http://www.techsmith.com/morae.asp

Acceptance Testing

Acceptance testing is the final testing done on the software prior to its final delivery. Please note that acceptance testing is different from user acceptance testing which is normally done by the customer or representative of the customer within the company.

Acceptance testing is sometimes also referred as functional test because each acceptance testing is also testing the functionality of the software.

Acceptance testing should be defined and agreed during the requirement phase of the project and is normally defined by the business customer as the minimum test to be executed before the delivery of the software. Some customer is hesitant or not technical enough to write the acceptance testing, that is when the BA comes in action, every requirement gathered during the investigation phase should be converted into acceptance testing. Best acceptance test criteria will be created when customer, BA, developer and tester get together, this will also avoid certain test to be run multiple time during the delivery.

Acceptance testing in Agile

Traditionally acceptance testing is done at the end of the project but in an agile environment acceptance tests will be defined and agreed at the beginning of every iteration. Every user story becomes a test and the story is not complete until it passes these acceptance criteria.
Acceptance test helps developer to understand the functionality from the user story. Make sure all the scenario in the user story is covered by the acceptance test. Each acceptance test should define the environment, inputs, steps and outputs for each user story. Make sure each acceptance test is understood and verified by the customer (this is very important if someone else is writing these test on customer’s behalf)

Iteration Retrospective

Retrospective is an agile process which allows the team to stop and look at what they have been doing and ways to improve.

There are many types of retrospective depending upon when it is done; if you do a retrospective at the end of the iteration it is called iteration retrospective.

The main goal of the retrospective is to discuss with the team what went wrong, why and how can we prevent it in the future. The outcome of the retrospective may change the way you execute the next iterations.

There are 3 fundamental questions which the team should be asking

• What went well in the iteration, which we should continue doing?
• What should we stop doing?
• What should we start doing?

Please note the order of the question it is very important for the team morale to talk about success first before discussing the bag things.

By discussing the problem and suggestion the team can change the way they run the next iteration and eventually grow and be more responsive and productive. A retrospective should be plan for about 30-40 minutes, ensure the time and location used is convenient for every team member to attend, this meeting should not be optional. Shareholder, Business Unit, SME, BA, Developer, QA in fact anyone and everyone who was involved in the iteration should be attending the meeting, you may invite customer in the meeting depending upon their involvement.

Retrospective should not be a blame and shame session, it is not about who did wrong, it should be all about how can the team improve based on the team experiences. Team members should not be scared to speak up and admit the things which were done wrong.

Get feedback from the team members about the retrospective to make the retrospective better for them and finally don’t forget to thank the team to be open and honest.

Critical Appraisal

Critical appraisal is the done at the end of designing phase, the main purpose of this task is to do a final check between proposed solution and physical design, this task along with solution walkthrough gives the stakeholder and the team a common understanding and also the opportunity to identify any missing requirement and most importantly to validate the proposed solution.

The following people (or group) should be attending this meetings

• Business Analysts
• Stakeholders and SMEs
• Business Users
• Development Team

Some of the advantages of this process are

• Confirming the Business Requirement.
• Confirming the physical design.
• Improve stakeholder’s confidence in the project.
• Identify any people or organization problems.
• Identify any function or data problems.
• Identify any performance or workflow issues.

The main topic in this process is to match logical and physical design, if there are data models created, make sure the domain is complete, there are no duplication or redundant data, identify any relationship problems.

The final question BA should ask the team is ‘Does the proposed system meet the organization goals?’. Always remember it is easier to change the design and solution on paper than to change few hundred lines of code.

Preparing Business Case

Developing a new product or functionality involves ensuring the money is spent wisely and that there is proper ROI (Returns on the investment). A business case is a detailed report used by the stakeholder/sponsor to justify the need of the project. The report should provide all the relevant information in an easy to understand format. In some companies business case is a must to receive funding and go-ahead for the project.

A business case is used to support a particular course of action when there may be several different options; the most important aspect of the business case is the cost-benefit analysis.

Identify your audience early in the process; you will have to address each audience's need, concern, expectation and level of understanding in the document.

Cost Benefit Analysis should be broken down into two categories, 'Direct Costs' and 'Indirect Costs', list all the topics under each category. With my experience sponsor loves valuing in dollars, try to work out each of the cost and benefits in dollars.

Although there is no official format or one that works for everyone, I can suggest you to structure the document in the following section

• Background
• Effect/Risk of the problem
• Costs and Benefits
• Proposal
• Impact
• Conclusion/Recommendation

Other factors which should be considered in the business case are

• Financial (expense and revenue)
• Corporate commitment
• Quality
• Customer pressure/satisfaction
• Industry pressure
• Legal compliance

Finally these are some of the questions which should be answered in the business case document

• Why are we doing this project?
• What is the problem this project is trying to address?
• Are there any workarounds or alternates?
• What are business benefits?
• How are we going to solve the problem?
• How much it is going to cost and how long will it take?
• If we do this project, what are the risks?
• If we don’t do this project, what are the risks?
• If we need to measure success how will be measure it?

Try to answer the questions above in the document to create a good business case proposal. In the end of the document make sure you summarise the problem, costs and benefits of the proposed solution, the document should be structured to highlight that the benefits outweighs cost.

See you next time.

Crash Party

I know what springs to mind when you hear 'Crash Party', but I am not talking about gate crashing or going to a party you haven't been invited. I am talking about Crash party before the release of the software, so let me start by explaining what is a crash party and why there is a need for one?

Testing plays a crucial role in the successful delivery of today’s complex, heterogeneous, business-critical software systems, as software get more and more complicated, there is a need to improve quality which poses challenge to the QA team, crash party is yet another way to improve quality.

Crash party is another form of collaborative group testing when a group of people (Developers, BA, QA, Support) gets together for a limited amount of time and test the functionality of the product with the intention to find as many defects as possible, it works on a very simple principle that when multiple people are using the system in a non predictable way, they are bound to find workflows (along with defects) which hasn't been thought, documented and/or tested before. Some Crash party may use a predefined script (e.g. UAT ) for the testing. Crash party can also be used for load and stress testing.

Crash party is an excellent way to bring team members up to speed, get them familiar with the area they haven’t work before, and the most important thing is to make them feel a part of the entire product.

Each team member participating in the crash party may be given an area of the product to test. Give cards or paper to each team member to record the defects and the steps to reproduce it, I would highly recommend you to not introduce any electronic bug recording system during this process, the reason being it is easier to write it on a piece of paper and expand that later once the crash party is over.

One of key things to ensure in a crash party is to make sure that the test cases and/or areas are evenly distributed among the team members and to avoid repeated test steps. Also make sure you are not executing any steps which have already been tested by automated tools and regression testing. Always tell the team member the goal is to find what we haven’t found before, 'we don't know what we don't know'.

After the Crash Party is completed, compile a list of defects found during the process, there may be some defects reported due to incorrect data entry or workflow, make sure you discuss that with the BA to ensure the defect is still relevant. The next and the most important step is to prioritise the defects to be fixed before the release; the ones which can’t be fixed in the current release will be flagged for the next release.

Finally software testing is an art, testing practices have not changed since last few years, but the tools and techniques have, complete testing is infeasible, so try to implement quality at every stage of development.

Agile Vs Waterfall

I am pretty sure this topic has been discussed many times and is there a clear winner ... I guess not.
I have been working with waterfall methods all my life and more recently with agile, if I have to summarise they both have their advantages and disadvantages.

I thoroughly enjoyed doing analysis in a water fall method, partly because you were given the opportunity to think and discuss solution upfront, so more time was spend doing the requirements gathering this works really well where project has limited resource (time or money) and clear objective.

On the other hand the disadvantage with the waterfall method (more so in the current era) is that it is not as versatile as agile. Business are growing (and some of them are shrinking), as day goes by there are new competition in the market, new legislations and other factors which affect the company and needs to be responded immediately, in this type of environment agile allows quick and timely changes.
Agile also allows team to delivery solution to the QA team and possible to the customer quicker than the waterfall method.