Putting Six Sigma to Work in Business-to-Business
1. 'Outside-In' Thinking: Sales Start with the Customer
2. Focus on What Customers Value in the Buying Process
Define: What Does Sales Expect to Gain?
Measure: A Loyalty Baseline
Analyze: What Do Customers Value?
Improve: How Should the Company Sell Differently?
Control: Measuring to Sustain Improvements
Understanding the Purpose and Use of Benchmarking.
The crux of benchmarking is learning by sharing information between businesses. By comparing work processes, inputs and outputs, you can gain valuable information that can help you improve your own process. At a very high level, the process of benchmarking can be broken down into three steps:
1. Evaluate and measure your own operation or specific process to identify weaknesses and strengths.
2. Initiate a benchmarking study and document processes that are more productive or efficient than yours.
3. Determine how to adapt successful processes and procedures from those who may be doing it better than your process.
Core Set of Effectiveness Metrics for Software and IT.
1. Appraisal cost per defect by phase and appraisal type
2. Rework cost per defect by phase and appraisal type
3. Value-added, appraisal and rework as a percentage of effort
4. Defect containment effectiveness
5. Total containment effectiveness
6. Effort variance normalized for size
7. Schedule variance normalized for size
8. Defect density, or defect per size - total "insertion" rate
9. Effort per size, or productivity
10. Duration per size, or cycle time
Start Software Testing with All Five Essentials in Place.
1. Five essential elements are required for successful software testing. If any one of the five is missing or inadequate, the test effort will most likely fall far short of what could otherwise be achieved. Exploring these five essentials can help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of any software testing program
2. A test strategy that indicates what types of testing and the amount of testing that will work best at finding the defects lurking in the software.
3. A testing plan of the actual testing tasks that will need to be execute to carry out the test strategy.
4. Test cases that have been prepared in advance in the form of detailed examples you will
use to check that the software will actually meet its requirementsTest data consisting of both input test data and database test data to use while you are executing your test cases.
5. A test environment which you will use to carry out your testing.
