Keeping the customer in mind at all times, HEALTH-e WORKFORCE SOLUTIONS makes the quality of our products and service our highest priority. From the quality-assurance efforts of each employee to the quality of our company as a whole, we devote ourselves to creating products and services that satisfy and exceed our customers’ expectations.

• Solve problems by directly observing all of our operations and processes.
• Quickly complete the Plan, Do, Check & Act (PDCA) cycle in all situations.
• Thoroughly analyse any failures, and establish procedures based on that analysis, so that mistakes are never repeated.
• Proactively consider our customers’ satisfaction so they will genuinely prefer purchasing Health-e Workforce Solutions software and expertise.
• Seize the opportunity presented by customer comments and complaints to inform our decisions when enhancing our software.
• Foster a climate in which attention is paid to even the most commonplace events.

Software Development Quality Plan

The purpose of the Quality Plan is to detail how HEALTH-e WORKFORCE SOLUTIONS’ quality processes for software development are to be implemented to ensure that the development outputs are delivered fit-for-purpose. This will be achieved by ensuring that all development processes are conducted in a quality manner (quality assurance) and by developing quality criteria for the outputs themselves (quality control).

To achieve this, the Software Development Quality Management Plan includes the following components:

• Quality Assurance - to ensure quality software development management processes
• Quality Control - via the development of quality outputs

Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance for the Health-e Workforce Solutions Software Development will be achieved by defining the relevant quality management processes that will be applied.

To ensure that Health-e Workforce Solutions Software Development is managed to an appropriate level of quality, Health-e Workforce Solutions will employ the Agile philosophy of software development which promotes the following methodologies;

• Test driven development - a coding method based on writing tests for functions prior to writing the functions themselves
• Continuous integration - automated building of the software for every commit of the code. As each piece of code is submitted it is collected by a central server, tested, built and packaged ready for deployment
• Rapid continuous delivery of useful software – deployment of updated software to the production environment at regular and short intervals. Rapid continuous delivery is made possible by the continuous integration methodology.
• Customer feedback at individual feature completion – feedback is sought from customers to ensure the feature development is heading in the right direction

Customer feedback at individual feature completion is encouraged by the rapid continuous delivery of useful software methodology.

The implications for quality assurance from the test driven software development methodology are twofold in that test driven development ensures there is an understanding of what the functions are intended to do and there is verification that the code is doing it. Test driven development is supported by continuous integration.

The following coverage metrics are delivered from reporting tools as part of the continuous integration process every time a piece of code is submitted.

•  Function coverage - Has each function in the program been called? This is the lowest coverage level of testing, requiring that use case is tested.
• Statement coverage - Has each code in the program been executed? The most comprehensive coverage level of testing. All statements are tested for execution.
• Branch coverage - Has every edge in the program been executed? Testing that all control paths have been covered.
  Performance against coverage metrics is monitored continuously.

The Health-e Workforce Solutions target for code coverage tests is 80%. Individual application modules are weighted for importance. Continuous integration test scripts are written in house by Health-e Workforce Solutions developers.
Rapid continuous delivery of useful software promoted customer dialogue and is an ideal method of ensuring ‘fit for purpose’.

Output Quality Control
Quality control for the Health-e Workforce Solutions Software Development will be achieved by defining the relevant quality criteria for the outputs, or what characteristics make them ‘fit for purpose’.

The primary output quality criterion for Health-e Workforce Solutions development is application integrity. Application integrity is measured by coverage testing and bug reports from testers and users.

Execution time is a secondary output criteria. Code is monitored routinely for execution time. If execution time exceeds a set target – 1 second maximum – the code is logged for investigation. Execution time will be displayed on each page of the application to facilitate error identification.

A tertiary measure is load time. This is a measure of the time between application start-up and application ready. Because Health-e Workforce Solutions is a data processing intensive application, it is advantageous to have a large percentage of the on disk data loaded at start-up. For this reason, the load time target is comparatively long by industry standards at a maximum three minutes as load time increases linearly with data loaded.

Software Implementation Quality Plan

The purpose of the Quality Plan is to detail how Health-e Workforce Solutions’ quality processes for software implementation are to be employed to ensure that the implementation proceeds as scheduled within the proposed budget. This will be achieved by ensuring that all software implementation processes are conducted in a quality manner (quality assurance) and by developing quality criteria for the implementation (quality control).