Let this Year be the year to be remembered for your kindness, helpfulness,
achieving greater hights in the area of your activities that you most
cherished.

On Sun, 02 Jan 2011 01:38:12 +0530, EDWARD F WELLER III
<edwardfwelleriii@...> wrote:

> As you consider measures early in the continuous improvement effort - it
> is useful to consider where you plan to be/want to be in the future (I
> hate to put it in these terms - L3/4/5 - so think of it along the  lines
> of "If I want to continuously improve, what measurement will be needed
> to support the org) then you will be able to define the "L2" measurement
> needs that will evolve to later needs.
>
> As an example - you collect actual effort spent on a project. next step
> is to collect effort by activity on a project - in part to identify
> rework costs separately from development costs. Next step might be
> prediction models based on effort by activity. The data you collect
> would also need tags - i.e., what information do I need to identify type
> of project, technology., product line, and other information needed to
> sub-group the data. Looking ahead will enable your next steps
>
> So, do not think merely in the short term - think of where you want to
> be 2-3-4-5 years down the road. Of course the downside is collecting too
> much too early can be wasteful and lead to "why are we collecting all
> this data when no one uses it?" questions from the data providers.
>
> A delicate balance is needed as well as skillful leadership that can
> explain and convince the people measurement is worth the effort.


--

Thanks & Regards RCGoyal


rcgoyal@..., rcgoyal@... , +919820068417, +9169463964

Hi All,

My friend is working in an Organization, which has dedicated SQA team to look in
to Process Compliance and audits. Recently they have employed a consultancy to
guide them in thier CMMI Journey.

  In order to implement the Practice  PPQA SP 1.2  "Objectively Evaluate Work
Product", the organization has decided to use SQA to review the Work Products.
However the consultancy has advised to use the Project members belonging to the
project to review the work products. They also advised that , only the Project
Member should/can technically review / Test the work product (Wheras SQA can't)
to satisfy this practice . For Example: It is expected Unit testing  & System
Testing should be executed by the Project member on sampling basis to satisfy
this practice.

  However what the Organization believes is , this practice as given in the model
(PA- Introductory notes and Sub Practice) talks about having checklist against
procedures,standards,etc and perform QA/Peer review and doesn't demand any
technical review(verification) or  functionality testing of the product. Also
they believe the SQA team is capable of performing this Practice according to
the model and its not necessary to have Project members (unless the Organization
has it as strategy to reduce workload on SQA/etc, but only after providing QA
training to Project Members )

Eventhough this forum has addressed similar kind of questions in the past for
this practice, i request your expert inputs to the organization and to the
consultancy on implementing SP1.2...

Regards
Cloony

Cloony,

My recommendation in this case: your friend's organization should kick
the consultancy, at least as far as CMMI consulting is concerned, and
continue with their proposed approach.

The organization is correct in thinking that PPQA is about checking
against procedures, standards etc. while technical reviews,
unit tests etc. are part of verification and possibly validation.

If the organization has a dedicated SQA team it seems appropriate to
give that team the responsibility for PPQA as well - or maybe they are
already doing what is needed, just under a different name?
Actually, PPQA in CMMI is more or less the same process as SQA in the
predecessor model CMM, but since CMMI is not only about software, the
"S" in SQA was no longer appropriate so it was renamed PPQA.

Just ensure that the SQA team achieves an adequate coverage of the
various processes, and that they interpret the procedures and standards
in a useful way. I have occasionally seen such central groups that
either looked at the various processes only very rarely and
superficially, or that were rather bureaucratic and lost track of
the benefit they are trying to achieve.

Best regards
Ralf


Am 04.01.2011 11:35, schrieb cloony.william:
>
>
> Hi All,
>
> My friend is working in an Organization, which has dedicated SQA team to
> look in to Process Compliance and audits. Recently they have employed a
> consultancy to guide them in thier CMMI Journey.
>
> In order to implement the Practice PPQA SP 1.2 "Objectively Evaluate
> Work Product", the organization has decided to use SQA to review the
> Work Products. However the consultancy has advised to use the Project
> members belonging to the project to review the work products. They also
> advised that , only the Project Member should/can technically review /
> Test the work product (Wheras SQA can't) to satisfy this practice . For
> Example: It is expected Unit testing & System Testing should be executed
> by the Project member on sampling basis to satisfy this practice.
>
> However what the Organization believes is , this practice as given in
> the model (PA- Introductory notes and Sub Practice) talks about having
> checklist against procedures,standards,etc and perform QA/Peer review
> and doesn't demand any technical review(verification) or functionality
> testing of the product. Also they believe the SQA team is capable of
> performing this Practice according to the model and its not necessary to
> have Project members (unless the Organization has it as strategy to
> reduce workload on SQA/etc, but only after providing QA training to
> Project Members )
>
> Eventhough this forum has addressed similar kind of questions in the
> past for this practice, i request your expert inputs to the organization
> and to the consultancy on implementing SP1.2...
>
> Regards
> Cloony
>
>

--

Dr. Ralf Kneuper
Beratung fuer Softwarequalitaetsmanagement und Prozessverbesserung
SEI-certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser for CMMI-DEV and CMMI-SVC
iNTACS-certified ISO/IEC 15504 Principal Assessor
Zertifizierter V-Modell XT Prozessingenieur (Ping)
Lehrbeauftragter am Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)

Philipp-Roeth-Weg 14        ralf@...
D-64295 Darmstadt           www.kneuper.de
Germany
Tel. +49-(0)173-3432005

PGP Public Key and Fingerprint: see www.kneuper.de/Kontakt/pgp-key.html

Hi Clooney,

�

I think that there may be a misunderstanding of the intent of this specific practice.� The intent of PPQA SP 1.2 "Objectively Evaluate Work Product" is to evaluate work products to ensure that the organizational processes and standards for creating them are being followed.� This is not a �testing� exercise in that testing focuses on capturing defects between products and their requirements and is generally not effective at capturing non-compliances in how the products were created (plus you will also want to evaluate non-code works products against their standards).� As an example, most organizations have coding standards that promote maintainability; generally testing cannot distinguish if a programmer used proper coding standards or if the product was written in spaghetti code.� �In short, unit testing does not satisfy the intent of PPQA SP 1.2 "Objectively Evaluate Work Product".

Although it is not required to be done this way, I have usually found it more effective to include work product standards as peer review criteria for those products, that way NCs that can cause problems later are addressed at their source before entering a baseline.� As long as individuals other than the author/developer are part of the peer review you have not violated the �Objectively� clause. �There are also automated tools you can purchase capable of validating that specific coding standards are followed.

I still use the SQA team to audit process compliance and spot audit work product compliance.

Cheers,

 
 
   

Hi All,

My friend is working in an Organization, which has dedicated SQA team to look in to Process Compliance and audits. Recently they have employed a consultancy to guide them in thier CMMI Journey.

In order to implement the Practice  PPQA SP 1.2  "Objectively Evaluate Work Product", the organization has decided to use SQA to review the Work Products. However the consultancy has advised to use the Project members belonging to the project to review the work products. They also advised that , only the Project Member should/can technically review / Test the work product (Wheras SQA can't) to satisfy this practice . For Example: It is expected Unit testing  & System Testing should be executed by the Project member on sampling basis to satisfy this practice.  

However what the Organization believes is , this practice as given in the model (PA- Introductory notes and Sub Practice) talks about having checklist against procedures,standards,etc and perform QA/Peer review and doesn't demand any technical review(verification) or  functionality testing of the product. Also they believe the SQA team is capable of performing this Practice according to the model and its not necessary to have Project members (unless the Organization has it as strategy to reduce workload on SQA/etc, but only after providing QA training to Project Members )

Eventhough this forum has addressed similar kind of questions in the past for this practice, i request your expert inputs to the organization and to the consultancy on implementing SP1.2...

Regards
Cloony

 
   

Hi Cloony,

There may be a couple of things going on here.

In many organizations, the SQA folks are not engineers, and therefore they don't
always have the technical capability to review the quality of work products. 
That may be the basis of the consultant's suggestion.  If the people are
qualified to perform the work product audits, and they are not auditing their
own work, the CMMI is fine with it.  Having project members do the work product
audits is a great idea, but not required.  In fact, work product audits can be a
great way to cross-train other members of the organization; they must of course
be capable of technically reviewing the work products.

The reducing work on the SQA people is another possible reason, although, I
usually state this as increasing the bandwidth that SQA has so they can perform
more process audits.  If you are going for ML3 and will be having Peer Reviews
(VER SG2), then you can have people who are already going to be in the work
product reviews act in the stead of the SQA folks, to accomplish both the VER
and PPQA tasks at the same time.

Best regards,

DAGreer


--- In cmmi_process_improvement@yahoogroups.com, "cloony.william"
<cloony.william@...> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> My friend is working in an Organization, which has dedicated SQA team to look
in to Process Compliance and audits. Recently they have employed a consultancy
to guide them in thier CMMI Journey.
>
>  In order to implement the Practice  PPQA SP 1.2  "Objectively Evaluate Work
Product", the organization has decided to use SQA to review the Work Products.
However the consultancy has advised to use the Project members belonging to the
project to review the work products. They also advised that , only the Project
Member should/can technically review / Test the work product (Wheras SQA can't)
to satisfy this practice . For Example: It is expected Unit testing  & System
Testing should be executed by the Project member on sampling basis to satisfy
this practice.
>
>  However what the Organization believes is , this practice as given in the
model (PA- Introductory notes and Sub Practice) talks about having checklist
against procedures,standards,etc and perform QA/Peer review and doesn't demand
any technical review(verification) or  functionality testing of the product.
Also they believe the SQA team is capable of performing this Practice according
to the model and its not necessary to have Project members (unless the
Organization has it as strategy to reduce workload on SQA/etc, but only after
providing QA training to Project Members )
>
> Eventhough this forum has addressed similar kind of questions in the past for
this practice, i request your expert inputs to the organization and to the
consultancy on implementing SP1.2...
>
> Regards
> Cloony
>

Hi all,

I wrote a somewhat positive, somewhat critical blog on version 1.3. I am curious
what you think about the blog.
http://www.improvementfocus.com/pages/posts/cmmi-version-1.3-has-been-released-s\
ome-first-reflections-109.php

Regards, Andr�

andre.heijstek@...
www.improvementfocus.nl
twitter: @andreheijstek
Mobile: +31 648476451
Marga Klomp�straat 23
2805 CZ Gouda
The Netherlands