Solutions development company uses Compuware to ensure software quality

Providing software quality and ensuring the solutions developed are predictable, no matter the size of the project, is critical for development companies. Realising this, Oakwell Solutions, a South African company that develops solutions on the Microsoft platform, recently contracted Compuware to complete a stringent audit of its quality assurance processes.

"We are experiencing rapid growth and wanted to ensure the quality of software we developed was not impacted in any way," comments Shane Coetser, director and co-founder of Oakwell Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. "We already had a well-defined structure but realised that it is imperative to check one`s processes continuously, so we turned to Compuware, leaders in quality assurance of methodologies and processes within the application lifecycle."

Coetser believes technology such as Microsoft provides Oakwell Solutions with an opportunity and gets them into the customer, but clients are demanding increasing quality in these tough economic times.

"We`ve found that organisations have been burnt too many times before when it comes to applications development and we believed that critically analysing our processes was a definite and concrete way of demonstrating our investment in, and commitment to, software quality," explains Coetser.

Oakwell, which has one of the largest concentrations of Microsoft certified staff in SA, focuses on developing collaborative solutions on horizontal levels, such as employee self-service and intranet-based solutions.

"We`ve found a lot of organisations have an existing investment in the back-end and want to leverage off new technologies, so we integrate these into their back-end solutions," says Coetser.

Compuware SA carried out a full process audit, producing a document that clearly identified all the risk areas as well as detailing how to solve these. "The key plus for us was that Compuware provided this service, highlighting areas and flaws within our current processes without pushing product. Once we had studied the audit, they then recommended certain tools to solve the identified issues."

Tracey Rouessart, product manager at Compuware SA, says following the audit, Compuware realised what Oakwell required was a suite of testing and quality assurance tools.

"The QA Centre tools that Oakwell then utilised were Reconcile, a requirements management tool for managing business, functional and testing requirements, with a definite audit trail; QA Director, which enables test management of the entire Oakwell testing team; TrackRecord, which looks at defect tracking, including managing scheduling and testing defects; and TestPartner, which automates testing of web and Windows-based solutions and features advance reporting."

"With the use of these tools, we now have the ability to manage what the client wants in a centralised environment, that is, we have centralised control of requirements, developments, resources and testing, all critical in our solutions environment," comments Coetser, adding that his company also now enjoys better quality in their solutions and more accurate solution delivery.

"Quite simply through utilising the Compuware tools, we are able to deliver predictable quality in all our solutions."