End-to-End Quality Approach: 14 Levels of Testing
In 2015, the Standard & Poor’s Ratings IT team set out an ambitious objective—to tighten the process and controls around the quality of code deployed to production. Based on internal cost of quality assessments, and supporting agile and waterfall internal engineering processes, distinct testing levels were identified to help push quality left and root out the underlying causes of defects as early as possible. The ‘14 Levels of Testing’ were defined to collaboratively span organizational functions, establish quality expectations, and help track towards the goal of eliminating defects. Adrian Thibodeau and Chintan Pandya review their 14 Levels of Testing and focus specifically on sharing the processes and tools employed to help govern the delivery of quality. Adrian and Chintan discuss metrics and dashboards, defect lifecycle management, their home-grown QA Workflow Portal, testing vendor SLAs and contracts, and facilitating UAT best-practices.
Vice president Adrian Thibodeau has led the QA & Metrics team at Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services since 2011 and held numerous other roles since 2005. For the past four years, Adrian has led the Ratings QA department in a number of transformational initiatives: adoption of the TMMi Operational Maturity Model, revision of its automation framework, a shift to metric-driven reporting, and the expansion of the team’s quality leadership into static code analysis and data.
A QA professional since 2004, Chintan Pandya has been senior director and member of the QA & Metrics team at Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services since 2005. Chintan has led S&P’s QA portfolio, responsible for quality assurance and compliance testing for the Ratings’ business workflow applications. He has led numerous innovations to further the efficiency and effectiveness of S&P’s test teams—adoption of the TMMi Operational Maturity Model enhancements and the automation of complex end-to-end data flows.