Key and Seena Technologies

Full Lifecycle QA, Holistic Data Management and SOA

Key and Seena Partner on Services Offerings for Full Lifecycle QA, Holistic Data Management and SOA

Quality Assurance (QA) is often viewed as synonymous with the testing cycle of a development project. However, full Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) QA entails the disciplines and activities that provide important types of accountability to the organization:

  • The project meets the expectations of the users
  • All required documentation is available to support IT business controls and regulatory compliance

This accountability is achieved by the following major activities:

  • Assuring requirements are clearly specified and conformity to the requirements is traceable
  • Managing variability to the requirements and adjusting conformity checks
  • Performing Quality Control on the deliverables - includes the testing function, and facilitating reviews

Key's new strategic partner, Seena Technologies, has QA teams that have developed methodologies in applying full requirements and documentation review, automated testing and end-to-end change management processes and procedures for their clients to ensure the greatest quality delivered within their systems.

Key and Seena have developed the KeyStart QA Healthcheck for our clients. This cost-effective, fixed-price engagement yields a valuable assessment of the existing QA environment within the enterprise, from a business and IT domain perspective. It looks at the practices, methodologies and tools in place regarding:

  • Requirements capture and documentation
  • Open-source licensing, if any
  • Test plans and scripts
  • Unit, function, system, integration, regression and performance testing
  • Defect and change management
  • IT compliance controls

The KeyStart QA Healthcheck identifies associated top gaps, risks and vulnerabilities, and yields recommendations for best next steps. The program is vendor-agnostic and designed to provide tangible value and benefit to the organization. For more information on this service, contact Pete Elliot at pelliot@keyinfo.com or 818.737.2804.

"Part of what we do is to provide QA as a neutral third party," points out Adriano Gonzalez, Director of Sales and Marketing for Seena Technologies. "One of the advantages of doing this, especially with outsourcing and/or offshoring projects, is that it provides a formal objective means including all necessary systems documentation to make sure that you are in compliance with critical regulations, for example Sarbanes-Oxley.”

Along with the specialists at Seena, Key can now work with our clients to provide a complete QA solution. Teams made up of Key and Seena specialists in Quality Assurance will provide solutions that can extend across the full development lifecycle. QA foundations are built that can establish or supplement a complete QA discipline within the enterprise environment.

The continuously improved methodology and tools provided by Seena offers full transparency of all end-to-end QA processes. These processes are monitored with Seena's proprietary QA dashboards that can be used by all stakeholders from client IT team members to top management. An example of Seena's QA dashboards can be viewed by clicking here.

That is just the tip of the iceberg. This new partnership pairs Key's solid infrastructure know-how with Seena's award-winning SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) and enterprise information management expertise.

Key and Seena provide a full range of services encompassing SOA frameworks from a business-driven perspective, including entry options and opportunities, strategy development, roadmap creation, implementation and governance. "SOA delivers on the long-awaited promise of object reusability. It provides a business component model that pragmatically maps the IT domain and services-to-business processes,” said Gonzalez.

Seena's holistic Enterprise Information Management (EIM) approach spans the full lifecycle of an enterprise's data assets, structured and unstructured, to provide a 360-degree view of the business: from data strategy and master data management, to data integration, knowledge management, data warehousing and business intelligence solutions. Seena's staff has published several books, contributed to trade journals and taught at the university level on related subjects.

According to an IBM/Gartner study, 80 to 85 percent of business is conducted with unstructured data … and unstructured data doubles every three months. This alone should demonstrate the need to focus heavily on the quality of all data, structured and unstructured, and how it is managed. Lief Morin, Key's president, notes, "You can have wonderful SOA fabric, but if the data is bad it's of no value. You really need data management to protect the quality of your data." Adds Majid Abai, president of Seena, "Absolutely -- data is probably the most undervalued asset in today's enterprises."

Key and Seena also offer KeyStart programs for SOA and for Data Management.

INsights will explore full lifecycle QA, holistic data management and SOA in greater detail in future issues.