Client Profile:  North Carolina's largest Health Insurer.

Challenge:  Faced with the growing costs of fixing defects discovered in late SDLC stages, our client's QA and User Acceptance Test (UAT) organizations partnered on a process improvement initiative designed to increase the identification of critical defects.  With an already impressive track record of less than 1% of total defects reaching production, the emphasis was placed on the identification of  better methods for capturing defects upstream. 

Solution:  SQA was hired to review the maturity of their current testing and automation practices while also uncovering inefficiencies in the upstream SDLC practices that support, enable and govern their success.  The SQA Assessment Methodology was used to conduct a formal review and analysis resulting in over 250 recommendations which were consolidated into 9 major focus areas.  Although a majority of the recommendations concentrated on Full Lifecycle Testing and Automation practices other areas or recommendations included Requirements, Software Quality Assurance, Lifecycle Defect Management, Metrics and Reporting, and Continuous Quality Improvements.

Impact:  Based on industry standard models used and an applied cost per defect metric, as recommendations are implemented it is expected that our client could reduce development costs by nearly $750,000 - $1,000,000 annually.