Secured Customer/Supplier Relationship via a Shared Quality Reference Dashboard

Acceptance represents a key phase of every software development project, whatever the process: Acquisition or Third Party Application Maintenance.

Beyond functional suitability, Acceptance must consider all software product dimensions, from quality characteristics such as Reliability, Maintainability and Performance, to work products like source code, requirements and test cases.

Easier communication between project stakeholders based on shared acceptance criteria and objective KPI
Contractualization of nonfunctional, technical requirements
Improved visibility on code quality
Increased trust in delivery by integrating test results and anomalies tracking
Secured deployment and operation
Lower acceptance costs and efforts

The Need to Minimize Risks in Software Development Outsourcing

More and more projects rely on externalisation, as a way to optimize resources (skill and availability) and to reduce the cost of software development. Moreover, outsourcing allows to parallelize some of the tasks and thus to accelerate projects delivery.

However, recent studies concluded that 31% of outsourced projects did not meet deadlines and had poor service quality, and 23% did not provide delivery compliance with requirements.

In this context, the Acceptance phase is a key challenge of every outsourcing strategy. Its unsuccess can have disastrous consequences on the operation of the application and result in significative financial loss during maintenance phase, and even lead to the abandonment of the project.

Acceptance phase may be difficult if poorly prepared: What are the requirements to validate? When must delivery be completed? What are the acceptance criteria?, etc… Most failures are often due to a neglected planning and a lack of communication with professional trust being put into question.

From the customer side, integrating several work packages can be complex (asynchronous delivery, heterogeneous level of quality…) and delivery acceptance wrongly focuses on functional coverage despite of product quality, which can badly affect the evolutive maintenance.
On the supplier side, constant adjunction of new requirements have a negative impact on project schedules. Moreover, low trust between stakeholders do not help data sharing.

The success of acceptance phase thus requires contractualising nonfunctional, technical requirements, and defining common and shared acceptance criteria.

Squore Allows You to Secure and Accelerate Your Acceptance Phase

Squore secures customer-supplier relationship via a common and objective software quality reference framework. It allows to prevent deadlines and costs slippages and to increase the visibility on product quality.

It provides the perfect solution for:

Ordering parties who need to ensure the quality of deliverables	Suppliers who need to speed up the acceptance phase
Supplier/customer relationship based on trust and exchange thanks to shared analysis method and acceptance criteria Accelerated and secured acceptance phase thanks to early defect correction made all along the project lifecycle Objective assessment of products compliance with quality criteria: more reliability, decrease of maintenance costs Broadcasting of best practices and their adoption by outsourced development teams	The guarantee of an accelerated acceptance phase by anticipating and improving developments via early defects and risk detection Evaluation and demonstration of the compliance of deliverables with final users quality requirements Securisation of the acceptance phase via a single, shared and objective assessment tool Continuous improvement of validation process thanks to performance and trend indicators

Ordering parties who need to ensure the quality of deliverables

Suppliers who need to speed up the acceptance phase

Supplier/customer relationship based on trust and exchange thanks to shared analysis method and acceptance criteria
Accelerated and secured acceptance phase thanks to early defect correction made all along the project lifecycle
Objective assessment of products compliance with quality criteria: more reliability, decrease of maintenance costs
Broadcasting of best practices and their adoption by outsourced development teams

The guarantee of an accelerated acceptance phase by anticipating and improving developments via early defects and risk detection
Evaluation and demonstration of the compliance of deliverables with final users quality requirements
Securisation of the acceptance phase via a single, shared and objective assessment tool
Continuous improvement of validation process thanks to performance and trend indicators

Improved Visibility on Overall Project Quality

Quantified acceptance criteria for every type of deliverable, from requirements to
documentation, via source code and test cases.
Out-of-the-box” standardized control points, metrics and rules using best industry standards, and still customizable to fit in-house practices.
Predefined software product quality models based on international standards: ISO SQuaRE 25010, ISO/IEC 9126, ECSS Quality Handbook, SQUALE . . .
Automatic generation of the consolidated list of non-compliance data and storage of quality records.

Overall quality evaluation dashboard

Increased Trust in Delivery by Integrating Test Results and Anomalies Tracking

Immediate detection of regressions, failed tests and deviations from plan.
Unrivaled in-depth analysis where at-risk components are immediately identified, down to the most elementary function or method.

The "findings" menu provides advanced filtering features allowing to immediately identify risky components

Review and Comparison of Project Progress

Continuous checking and monitoring of project progress and compliance with project requirements through Key Performance Indicators and trend analysis.
Easy comparison with other similar projects enabling objective and impartial decision-making.