For strategic business reasons, a leading provider of hybrid terrestrial and satellite technologies for commercial communications, preferred to port the next version of its product - a mobile vehicle tracking system - from the current Microsoft technology to J2EE. The product development was outsourced and the onus of quality of the product was on the outsourced vendor. However, a preliminary report raised questions on the quality of the product, hence, the client engaged STAG to perform independent verification and validation of their product.

We devised a test strategy to run 15% of the core modules four cycles of functional testing and the rest 85%, two cycles. This way we were sure that the key features were thoroughly tested and the rest of the features would be adequately tested. Next, perform two rounds of integration tests to validate long end-to-end scenarios involving multiple modules/features. These tests also include role based testing. Finally, conduct one round of performance tests using an open source tool, to ensure the cost of commercial tool will not bog down the customer.

A report was prepared with rating on scale of 1-5 for each feature with respect to the ratio of test cases executed with respect to that failed, the severity of the issues found, and the effort required for the workaround. This gave the client management the status quo of the product and the incremental improvement in quality needed over multiple cycles of testing. Finally, a detailed performance report on the product was prepared based on the variance in quality index of some core modules. The client management had sufficient inputs to base its decision to hold back immediate product release and preferred to invest additional time and effort in resolving all known issues. This prudent decision helped the client management to protect its investment from potential business risk due to poor quality software release.