There are three engagement types that account for the vast majority of the Quality Assurance Projects performed by QA Valley. These are QA Evaluation Projects, QA On Demand Projects, and QA Ongoing Projects. Each of these types presents clients with variations in duration, team organization, skills and level of technical expertise, project management practices, pricing and billing, and artifacts and deliverables. It is also normal for clients to morph from one engagement type to another depending on their requirements.

Engagements are closely monitored and tracked by QA Valley Project Managers who work in concert with elected clients’ representatives, which include project managers, development managers, quality assurance directors, software product managers, or technology managers. Online collaborative meetings between QA Valley and clients’ representatives may be conducted as daily scrum sessions, weekly, or biweekly depending on factors such as application complexity, development intensity, frequency of build delivery, or the severity and urgency to complete development and QA Cycles.

If during the execution of an engagement a client is not satisfied with the assigned QA Valley staff, the completeness of the artifacts produced, the level of project management, milestones, or delivery dates; QA Valley Senior Management will work directly with the affected client’s Senior Management to resolve the mutually agreed shortcomings. Resolution may sometimes mean that QA Valley alter the project staffing to more senior QA resources, adjust deliverables and milestones to more reachable targets, or sometimes may require that the client be more pragmatic in its expectations.

Clients are billed on monthly cycles or at the end of QA Cycles for those cycles that are less than a month in duration. Invoices are to be paid Net 30 Days, and can be paid by mailed checks, direct deposits, wire transfers, or by email submission containing images of the front and back of checks.

Evaluation QA Cycles

New clients are encouraged to commence their relationship with QA Valley with an Evaluation QA Cycles. These are short Two Weeks Software Quality Assurance Test Cycles on very small systems or apps, selected workflows of larger systems, or a subset of test cases from a comprehensive repository of regression conditions pertaining to complex transactions.

These short Evaluation QA Cycles enable the clients and QA Valley to establish whether longer term relationships should be pursued. Clients are exposed to QA Valley’s quality assurance practices, our technology managers and QA Test Engineers, our business culture, and the capacity for their staff to effectively interact and work with us.

Conversely, these Evaluation QA Cycles allow QA Valley to showcase its Software Quality Practices, Knowhow, Management, QA Staff, Technical Competencies, and Technology Infrastructure.

These cycles run for Two (2) Weeks, engaging Two (2) QA Test Engineers, managed by One (1) QA Project Manager. Each cycle is kicked off with a demonstration for the relevant client on the workflows or transactions to be tested, or short walkthroughs of a few of the test cases to be executed. There may be Three (3) Joint Review Sessions during the course of each week between the client and QA Valley. One at the beginning of the cycles, a second during the middle of the week, and a third at the end of the week.

At the end of each week, QA Valley presents the QA Deliverables and Artifacts to the client. These may be Defect Reports, Video Recordings of Workflow and / or Transaction Failures, Screen Capture with Annotated Comments, and Useful Discoveries that may not be within the scope of the Evaluation QA Cycles but which may be of significant value to the client.

When the cycle is complete, all Deliverables and Artifacts are presented and transmitted to the client to mark the end of the evaluation. The Client Representatives and QA Valley’s Management performs Closing Review where both parties objectively highlight their experiences, and a mutual decision is made whether the business relationship should be taken forward.

The price for the Evaluation QA Cycles is generally offered at a Significant Discount. The client is allocated Two (2) QA Test Engineers and One (1) Project Manager; but is ONLY charged for One (1) QA Test Engineer, at a Billing Rate Starting at $10/Hour. However, if the client feels that QA Valley was not able to satisfy its QA Requirements, then the client is NOT required to pay.

On Demand QA Cycles

QA Cycles are performed on demand for clients that accepted the results of the evaluation project and wishing to have QA Cycles executed on an as needed basis. These are generally software product developers that have planned development timelines and can forecast when software builds will be readied for QA Testing. These are also clients that have foregone the evaluation project but have immediate or urgent need to QA development builds as part of their routing product development and release lifecycles.

On Demand QA Cycles are single testing cycles that are executed in step with the testing phases of the produce development lifecycles of respective clients. In most cases clients alert QA Valley one or two weeks in advance so that our QA Project Managers are able to effectively forecast and schedule anticipated resource requirements, which include but are not limited to QA Test Engineers, QA Workstations, Software QA Tools, Test Lab Space, and Network Infrastructure.

The environments on which QA Cycles are executed may be local configurations and installations on the QA Valley infrastructure, or may be remote clients’ systems securely reachable over the web from the QA Valley Test Lab. In instances where the delivery platforms are specialty or proprietary devices, it is necessary that these be shipped to our QA Labs for the duration of the QA Cycles and are returned to the original clients following the closure of the engagement.

Clients that engage On Demand QA Cycles generally require repeat cycles as their software products mature from one release to another. Repeat QA Cycles are advantageous to both Clients and QA Valley. The Test Cases that QA Valley assimilates in earlier cycles are updated and reused in subsequent cycles, lowering the overall cost for future repeat cycles. QA Valley also attempts to utilize the same QA Test Engineers that were allocated in the earlier cycles, which simplify and expedite future cycles by eliminating or reducing the need for engineers to relearn the functionality previously executed.

Pricing for On Demand QA Cycles are influenced by several factors such as: 1) Size and Complexity of the system, 2) Platforms on which the system is to be tested, 3) Backwards compatibility, 4) Number of test cases, 5) Variations on device form factors, 6) Industry and application type, and several others. Establishing a price starts with a demonstration of the application to QA Valley and a walkthrough of a representative set of test cases. This information combined with the Rates show on the Price page form the metrics on which the final price is based. To address uncertainty clients are given approximate figures very early in its discussion with QA Valley, but once a QA Cycle has been conducted, the Repeat Cycles observe the same pricing metrics.

Ongoing QA Cycles

Clients that perform continuous development and deployment are frequently faced with larger proportions of Quality Assurance which inevitably exceed the capacity of their internal QA Team. These clients engage selections of QA Valley’s Quality Assurance Staff as fulltime equivalents to perform continuous QA Cycles as new software builds are generated. This is a just-in-time operational structure in which builds are immediately regression tested upon receipt and QA Artifacts and Defect Repositories are rapidly retransmitted to the respective software development teams.

Selections of QA Valley Staff are permanently allocated to individual clients, are thoroughly trained on client specific software products or application systems, may utilize dedicated infrastructure segments, function in working hours that have reasonable overlap with that of the assigned client, and have meetings and collaborative sessions at consistent times all sharing common communications platforms. These QA Sub Teams become integrated with the clients’ development organization, resulting in larger virtual software engineering forums configured for the rapid development, testing, and release of specific software products.

Benefits to this engagement model are commonly shared by both clients and QA Valley and necessitate little analysis to justify. Clients are assigned dedicated QA Resources who are educated on their specific software, resources are consistent through each QA Cycle, bond and culture are formed between clients’ and QA Valley’s staff, common causes and objectives evolve within the virtual teams, and the individual QA Valley teams attain maturity and sophistication on the product classes and industries resulting in more competitive software. Teams from both parties become immersed in common interests of making products that command greater acceptance in selected market verticals.

Pricing for On Going QA Cycles is simple and unambiguous since there is less clutter as to who worked on what over what period of time. This model is based on the utility of fulltime equivalents with the billing cycles occurring on a monthly basis. Clients are consistently billed at the end of the month for the number of fulltime resources contracted in the engagement. If the QA Cycles required the use of specialty infrastructure elements, network capacity, or lab space; these appear as clear delineated line items on the monthly invoice. The billing of this engagement type is straightforward and financially more manageable since future bills can be easily and accurately forecasted.