Maritz, Inc.

Number of people on the test team: 26

Number of developers supported by the test team: 200+

Best Practice Description :

Everyone is responsible for Quality. Maritz holds high a belief that effective client relationships are the key to clear requirements, an essential component of quality. This belief is visible in the Maritz System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) where clear requirements are uncovered through inquiry, detailed documentation, and validation through Quality Control methodologies.

Maritz's leadership reinforces the SDLC by evangelizing the standardization Quality Control policies across the enterprise. Through the creation of a Centralized Testing Group the following “Best Practices” have been put in place:

• Engagement of QA/QC early in the SDLC (Requirements Phase)
• Creation of test plans for all requests
• Implementation of “Risked-Based” regression testing
• Automation of regression tests for several large Clients
• Implementation of “touch points” with the development and project teams to review test cases and test results
• QA/QC approval/sign-off of releases
• Publishing monthly metric reports to senior management
• Defect Origination
• Defect to Test Case Ratio

These “Best Practices” are just the beginning. Maritz Inc. is moving forward very quickly by continually improving our processes and their acceptance. The next phase of our quality plan will implement:

Requirement Traceability Matrixes (RTM)

This will give us the ability to tie the test cases to the requirements systemically.

QA/QC metrics trend analysis

This will help us to identify and promote change.

We expect to see a Return on Investment (ROI) because of this effort. Identifying issues/defects earlier in the SDLC will reduce the cost of issue resolution. The Maritz Centralized Testing Group (QA/QC) is positioned as pro-active Change Agents who leverage their cross project perspective and testing expertise to add quality control rigor across the enterprise.