Sometimes it’s difficult to grasp what is wrong or what could be done to improve, especially if you are watching it from a distance. In these situations it’s often wise to rely on external help to get a clear and honest picture of what’s going on.

If you know that you want to improve some part of your software development cycle, but you’re not 100% sure what should be done and how, we help you assess the current state and guide on what should be done. An external interview based assessment is often the best way to get an honest picture of what’s going on.

VALA Assessments:

VALA’s Assessment Services are individually customized and always include the specific needs of the customer. Assessment Services contain technical audits but it can also help to evaluate how the organization, procedures or IT systems fulfill the requirements. In total we have listed 17 individual assessments so there’s definitely a case for everything related to software quality.

Our assessments also take into account the changes brought by AI: where relevant, we evaluate how well your current quality assurance processes are suited to AI-assisted development — and how prepared your organization is to test AI-native systems, where traditional quality assurance methods alone are not sufficient.

Some examples of VALA assessments: 

1. Prestudy of a system: Defining system, users, goals and implementation methods.

2. Project management: Project management of R&D or maintenance phase.

3. Risk management: Product risks and efficiency of mitigation activities.

4. Testing and Quality Assurance: Testing and QA procedures in R&D or maintenance phase.

5. Requirement management: Requirement management of product or system.

Following assessment types are supported:

• Preliminary audit to prepare for the formal audit
• Formal audit
• Follow-up audit to ensure that corrective actions are effective
  

Benefits of VALA Assessments – a well designed and implemented audit:

• Increases understanding of current status (project, product, system, process, organization…)
• Identifies the areas where improvement is needed
• Assesses risks, efficiency and quality
• Reinforces and strengthens internal control
• Highlights areas of good practice
• Provides evidence of conformance

Test Strategy

A Test Strategy defines test approach within the organization. It gives the starting point for Quality Assurance and Testing tasks in every project and program. By establishing unified ways of working and common tools we help test planning and enable sharing resources among projects.

AI is changing both the way software is developed and the nature of the software itself. A good testing strategy addresses this: how AI assistance is reflected in development and quality assurance work, and what testing AI-native systems specifically requires — for example in managing non-deterministic behavior or in continuous production monitoring.

Quality Playbook

A Quality Playbook takes the testing strategy approach even further by bringing everyone involved in product development into quality improvement. By extending quality activities across the entire product lifecycle, we ensure that we build the best possible system together. The playbook ultimately leads to an organization with a high-level quality culture – where quality is not just one team’s responsibility, but a shared way of working, in the age of AI as well.

Training your personnel is an important part of building quality culture and internal competencies. We are Finland’s leading quality company and one of the three official ISTQB trainers so don’t look further if you need help on this!

VALA has a long history in software testing and quality work. We are naturally using this to leverage skills of our new and old employees. By sharing and learning together we are developing our skills even further. And of course we want to utilize the latest trends in the domain and certifications to leverage our skills.

We don’t want to limit this to our own employees but offer you the opportunity to learn with us. We can arrange the same trainings to our customers also, either prefined certification trainings or custom training for you.

Read more from our dedicated Trainings page!