Understanding the Software Quality Assurance (SQA) process
Who is this article for?
Module developers and Users configuring and testing new projects or changes.
Area access is required.
Producing and supporting high quality software is central to Ideagen's business, as evidenced by the company’s longstanding ISO 9001 certification. A fundamental component of Ideagen's Software Quality Assurance (SQA)* process is a project release schedule.
Tracking a project release
Every Ideagen employee involved with software changes is required to carefully review, document, and test a release. Ideagen EHSQ (Formerly the DevonWay platform) Legacy projects use project boards or Legacy TrakWay tickets to help manage project details.
The SQA process applies to:
- platform
- customer specific modules/applications
- mobile application
- interfaces
New Development and Changes
The SQA process can be summarized in the following main steps.
Define Requirements
- Enhancements to the platform, customer applications, or interfaces, begin with a customer or employee submit a ticket that lists the requirements of the enhancement.
- A designated Ideagen person or team will review each incoming request, ensuring that the intent is understood and that requirements are thorough.
Design
- The appropriate team will design a solution, ensuring the requirements are met and that all quality, security, integrity, availability, and confidentiality requirements are maintained.
- If needed to meet the requirements, Ideagen may employ appropriately licensed third-party libraries.
- Third-party software is evaluated by running unit, functional, and acceptance tests. Ideagen does not use third-party software that is unsupported by a service provider or unsupportable by Ideagen employees.
Approve
- Prior to changes being implemented, the design must be approved, either internally or by the customer for customer applications.
- Depending on the complexity of the change, the approval to implement changes may be required by the Change Approval Board (CAB).
Build
- The designed and approved solution is implemented into the platform or module configurations.
- Ideagen maintains multiple environments that are used for the various stages of software development.
- Enhancements are initially built in the lowest environment.
- Software enhancements are not promoted to the next environment until after successful testing is achieved in the current environment.
Test
- The testing within each environment is completed by a defined team or individual, as listed in the SQA’s process.
- The QA team performs most tests for platform changes, which are a combination of automated and manual tests.
- Based on several factors, new tests may be written for each enhancement.
- Customers, project or support team members, and/or the ticket initiators perform most tests for module changes.
Communicate
- As part of implementing enhancements that introduce changes to functionality and/or new features, Ideagen updates corresponding platform release notes, blogs, documentation, and/or training materials, as needed.
Deploy
- On a defined and communicated schedule, Ideagen deploys new platform releases first to its U.S. hosted UAT environment, then roughly a week later, to its U.S. hosted production environment. After successfully running in the U.S. environments, this process is repeated a week later in UAT and two weeks later in production for Europe and Canadian hosted environments.
- For module configuration changes, those are deployed from the customer Build to the Test/UAT to the Production environment on a schedule determined with the customer.
- Individual tickets are grouped into releases for deployment.
* DevonWay Software Quality Assurance Process, v2.08 (1), 03/01/2025