Best Practices

IV&V is considered a “best practice” within the IT industry. The primary value of IV&V, in both the public and private sector, is in identifying high-risk areas early in a project, consequently allowing your organization to mitigate risks or prepare a contingency plan. IV&V should be performed by parties not directly engaged in project’s development to maintain an independent assessment of the quality of a project’s product. IV&V usually includes assessments of the operational environment, hardware, software, interfaces, system documentation and artifacts, and more to ensure that the product is well-engineered, and is being developed in accordance with your requirements. 

ENTERPRISE BENEFITS

Industry research yields that a disciplined approach to IT project, program, and portfolio management increases benefits realized by businesses from their investment in information technology assets and resources. Some benefits you may experience may include:

• Reduced rework and time savings due to a reduction in errors discovered early in an application development lifecycle
• Reduced overall cost and schedule delays by uncovering issues and risks early
• Promoted project culture consistent with the industry's best practices
• Communication increased among teams to further analyze functional and business requirements
• Informed project resources for faster and better decision-making

A Full View of Assurance

IV&V is usually initiated and implemented within an organization for IT testing efforts. While testing remains a critical quality assurance activity, it should not be the only reason to engage an IV&V expert. Testing is a key activity during IV&V, but only a small portion of a full IV&V analysis. The value of a third-party expert in IV&V allows your organization to look around every corner to ensure your system is being implemented correctly and to your requirements. Organizations attempting to reduce short-term costs increases long-term cost. IV&V with Quantam provides a 360-degree evaluation of your application’s implementation. 

The Quantam Difference

Quantam’s IV&V aims to accomplish the following best practice objectives for your organization:

ü  Facilitate early detection and correction of cost and schedule variances

ü  Enhance your organizational insight into development risks

ü  Support project lifecycle processes to ensure compliance with your project’s regulatory, performance, schedule, and budgetary goals

ü  Validate the project’s application and processes to ensure compliance with your functional and business requirements

The Quantam Independence Difference allows your organization to gain technical independence via our IV&V professionals who use their expertise to assess your development processes.  Our IV&V effort independently selects the portions of your application to analyze and test, selects the appropriate technique(s) based on the type of product your organization is installing, defines the schedule of IV&V activities, and helps your project leaders selects issues to manage.

The Quantam Verification Difference is in our quality control techniques during your system and its components assessment. During verification, our professionals review and align with your organization’s goals for preventing system requirement omissions, discovering problems, and ensuring the system is being developed correctly.

Some of our Quantam verification activities include:

• Verification of requirements against defined technical and functional specifications
• Verification of design against defined technical and functional specifications
• Verification of product code against defined standards
• Verification of terms, conditions, payment, etc., against your vendor contract
• Verification via Code reviews through a methodical review of the applications source code and  review of work products and system documentation

The Quantam Validation Difference is a process of establishing documented evidence that provides a high degree of assurance that your application achieves its intended requirements and validates your application operation as you expect it to.  Some of our validation techniques may include dynamic testing approaches by examining an application's physical response to changing variables, system testing, integration testing, system testing, and assistance during user acceptance testing.