How do you define efficiency and effectiveness with respect to Software Quality Assurance
1. How do you define Efficiency ? Please illustrate with examples of both
efficiency and in-efficiency.
2. How do you define Effectiveness ? Please illustrate with examples of both
effective testing and in-effective testing strategies.
3. Are the two not tightly coupled ? I mean can you be efficient without being effective or
can you be effective without being efficient ?
4. What is your list of top 5 (or 10) things that help you be both effective and efficient ?
thanks much,
Swam
Group Manager - "Quality Assurance Discussion Group"
http://qadg.blogspot.com
Good Answers (9)
Efficiency is getting all your testing done in the shortest time possible with the least amount of resources.
Effectiveness is doing the job right.
In practice, these are mutually exclusive. The best you can hope for is to strike a balance where you get the most effective QA strategy delivered in the most efficient way. If you want to be super-efficient, you're going to miss something. The question is, did you miss a Sev 1 defect or a Sev 4 defect.
Bottom line is you get what you pay for.
Top things:
1. Avoid dogma when developing testing strategies. Not all methodologies will work well with all projects.
2. Include QA resources at all stages of development from design to post-launch.
3. Create adequate testing enviroments that will closely mimic your production environments.
4. Be sure to have a Staging environment to which you can post your code for review so that not only can QA test in a controlled setting, but Operations can pre-test their deployment strategies.
5. Respect your employees. A happy QA Tester is more efficient and more effective than one who is looking for a new job during their lunch break.
6. Make sure you have a good, neutral project manager to coordinate everything and set up realistic schedules for builds and other necessities. While QA wants to work directly with developers, they should never be working for development (unless you want more bugs).
7. Make sure your QA Department has direct access to your development team as well as your design team to ask questions. If they have to wait 12 hours to get a reply, that's inefficient.
8. If you want to use automation, either pony up for a good tool set or STFU.
9. Use a good defect tracking tool.
10. When in doubt, use your brain.
I am not a SQA specialist, but probably the general answers would suffice.
1. Efficiency is the quality of completing a given number of work items in satisfactory, according to some measure, time frame.
2. Effectiveness is the quality of completing a number of satisfactory, according to some measure, work items in whatever time frame.
3. The concepts are related, but not equivalent. A diesel engine is more efficient than a gasoline one, but they are both effective. Note that both effectiveness and efficiency depend on certain pre-agreed measures, which when varied can achieve any combination of the two qualities.
4. Multi-task, but not more than 3-5 tasks at a time. Also let computers do what they do best--compute, and let humans do what we do best--think.
Efficiency : Efficiency is amount of computing resources and code required by a program to perform a function.
Effectiveness : Effectiveness is the extent to which the program satisfies specifications and fulfills user needs.
1. Here is a definition i like, picked from dictionary.com---the ratio of the work done or energy developed by a machine, engine, etc., to the energy supplied to it, usually expressed as a percentage..
2. Effectiveness- adequate to accomplish a purpose; producing the intended or expected result. Your effective testing strategy should be able to get you maximum no. of defects in the code.
3. You can be efficient but not effective. For e.g. someone who tests application diligently, execute all tests in good time is efficient, however if he is not finding bugs, he is not really effective. Another non testing related example might be of a small car efficient engine being used for drag racing, where it is certainly efficient but not effective....
4. Eye for detail, inquisitiveness, Not making assumptions, intuitive, creative,analytical.
Naren P
Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Analytics, PMP , CBIP
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Interesting question.
1.Efficiency : measures speed.
a.Context: SQA.
b.Assumption: SQA on Construction phase.
c.Application: How many lines of code/or given complexity modules are tested in a day.
d.Levers:
(i)Add more resources to increase efficiency at a given experience level
(ii)Replace with/add experienced resources for same level of work hours
(iii)Automate
e.Affects: usually affects schedule(since time is money , at some level, usually beyond the boundaries of current project', this affect translates to 'cost'.
f.Notes: variation in efficiency of your current process tells you how you are doing against baseline/controls. Process control chart helps you in this case. Corrective actions are/can be usually taken during this phase itself.
2.Effectiveness:measures productivity.
a.Context: SQA.
b.Assumption: SQA on Construction phase.
c.Application: Measures software conformance to design specifications.How many defects are found in the Software (lines of code/or at a given complexity # of code modules) tested in 1.c. Usually you will find effectiveness in downstream phases, during system testing/integration testing.
d.Levers:
(i)Add more resources at a given experience level keeping efficiency constant
(ii)Replace with /add experienced resources keeping efficiency constant
(iii)Automate
e.Affects: usually affects cost
f.Notes: Variation in effectiveness of your current process tells you how you are doing against design specifications. Defects identified at a later phase with Rootcauses on 'SQA on construction phase' tells you effectiveness of SQA on Construction phase.[If design does not conform to Customer requirements and 'Construction' conforms to 'Design', it's the ineffectiveness of 'Design' phase] Corrective actions are/can be usually taken during next phase(s) as 'Rework'.
3.Additional notes:Efficient processes may not deliver products that conform to customer specifications. Effective processes may not deliver products on time. Effectiveness and efficiency of a process can vary within set-limits(separate limits for efficiency and separate limits for effectiveness) to deliver products of acceptable quality on time.
Richard Z
President at ZULTNER & COMPANY
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As a practical matter, your baseline is your current people or effort doing SQA. So efficiency is whether you are improving more this year than last year. Since the headcount / effort stayed roughly the same, were you able to get more done? That's being efficient.
By the same token, did quality, as judged by your customers, improve? More than last year? Then you improved your effectiveness as well.
With a well managed SQA effort, both should improve. But it is certainly possible to do poorly on one, or both.
To do better at efficiency and/or effectiveness requires the same thing: improvement. The SQA folks should apply their improvement process to themselves and their own work -- and this includes their management. This also means that they have quantitative measures for their improved efficiency and effectiveness...
Milind L
Solution Archtect
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I would put
Efficiency is a ratio of output to input while effectiveness of matching the output with business mission alignment. To my opinion both are very very important but many times effectiveness takes a precedence over efficiency. Effectiveness needs efficiency while efficiency may exists without effectiveness.
I would quote one example in testing. Doing number of test cases per day may be a definition of efficiency while discovering maximum defects can be effectiveness. In Glenford Myers definition, testing is successful only when it finds a defect and finding more defect is an alignment to mission. It needs efficiency. But reverse is not true.
I don't know whether it is top 5 (or 10) but following things can help in improving effectiveness along with efficiency
1. Mission definition - People must know answer of what and why rather than how
2. Competencies - People must competent enough for the purpose to be more effective
3. Metrics - Generally efficiency is very easy to measure while effectiveness is difficult. Organization must establish measurement programs for effectiveness.
Other factors like management commitment, motivation, organizational environment etc also comes in picture
Richard T
starting Excellence Science & Creativity Colleges + 6 MBA Reading Clubs & Early/Mid/Exec Career Methods courses in Tokyo
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Efficiency is measured, traditionally, by ratios like maintenance cost per annum as a percentage of total cost of production of the last version bought. Higher values of this ratio indicate god-awful software that should not have been bought--promises not kept.
Effectiveness is traditionally measured by the degree of satisfaction of the customers of the business process in which the software that was sold is used by its customer--software that when sold to Bill in Company A working process X makes Company A customers more satisfied with outputs from Company A is effective. In other words the total quality impact on customers of a company that deploys an application measures its effectiveness------NOT anything in the company that buys and uses the application itself!!!!!!!! So far as I know only 3 companies world wide, all in Europe, measure software effectiveness this rigorously. Everyone else is narcissistic--doing the obvious.
For more see my McGraw Hill book on software quality Global Quality at Amazon,com or various chapters at the links below.
Links:
You have some answers below for your question but as an SQA you will be intersted in the work done by the Practical Software and Systems Measurement group that is standardizing IT metrics.
http://www.psmsc.com/
Links:
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Jessica M
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