Agresso HRM is continuing to invest in Quality software

We are still focusing on quality software here on HRM and apart form starting to make some backend changes to our build and check in process we have committed our selves to reach a bug count of 0 before we start up new development. We are of course aware that there may still be bugs but we really want our customer and our selves to get a new clean start with 4.5. On top of this commitment of fixing all open bugs we recruited a senior software tester that will join us at office on September 7. Not only will she be responsible for improving our test she will also help and manage the testing process from story cards to test cases. We are looking forward with great anticipation on the influence she will have on us here at development.

 

First priority for our new tester

1. Improve our ability to avoid regression bugs
2. Functionality testing
3. Usability testing

 

The hunt for quality

So how is the journey towards 0 bugs going, are we ever going go build features again you might wonder. If I may say so its going pretty darn well. And one reason for knowing this is that we have consolidated all customer bugs in to one list and we only work from this list. Here is a couple of quality KPI for you.

 

As you can se we have 23 open bugs at the moment. Don’t be alarmed by the deleted bug count. A bug can be deleted for a couple of reasons.

• Its already fixed in a later version
• Its a duplicate
• Its not reproducible for us
• Its NOT a bug, its  a feature ;) yeah I know but its true its now common but they do exist.

Also an interesting measurement is what kind of bugs are we finding and getting reports on .

We have 3 mainly three categories of bugs

Blocking – That is a bug so severe that there is no way around it, all or most customers would be affected by it because its a central piece of functionality.

Critical - That is a bug that is severe but there is a way around it, all or most customers would be affected by it because its a central piece of functionality.

High – All other bugs

The below chart illustrates both progress and the type of bugs: 

As you can see our fixrate is almost twice as high as the found rate, So given that we have a sustainable pace on both fixing and finding bugs it looks like we will be done with all bugs in about three weeks time  (26 currently open, 18 new bugs per week and we fix around 40 a week).

Alternative competences, profiles and expiration

This is a short tutorial on how to set up the Talent Management Portal to use alternative competences with expiration dates in competence profiles to manage required renewal of employee knowledge.

To go through this tutorial you need to have a role that allows you to create alternative competences, competence profiles, activities and assign competence profiles to employees. To approve of the employees activity result you need to be his or her manager. Also the NextLearn.CompetencePortal.Model.Learning.ProcessCompletedActivities job must be running. If the job isn't running or you're not sure how to check this contact your system administrator.

This tutorial will not explain activity, customer or provider filtering, nor will it explain in detail the basic creation of competence elements, profiles or activities. It will solely go through the procedure to combine these items in the correct way to make competence expiration work.

Creating an alternative competence element
Select Alternative competences in the menu and fill out the form that opens. For this exercise the most important datum is the expiration date. Set an expiration date of 2 months.

Creating a competence profile
Select Competence Profiles in the menu and create a new competence profile that contains the alternative competence created above as a required element.

Assigning the competence profile
Assign the competence profile to an employee of your choice.

Creating an activity
Select activities from the menu and create a new Manual Authorized activity. After creating the activity click on the add objective link on the list row for the new activity. Choose Select objectives - competence standard, and add the newly created alternative competence element as an objective of the new activity (note that you may have to change category in the competence element selection form to Alternative competences).

Enroll employees
Enroll the employee to the activity created above. For Manual Autorized activities no occasions are necessary.

Approve the activity result
As manager go to the manager start page and follow the link X consultations to handle. This brings you to a page where you can set the status of the employee's activity. Set the status to approved, and click Ok. After a while the employee will have been awarded the competence element.

Expiration

All that is necessary for the competence element is for some time to pass. The default setting in the Talent Management Portal is to include competences that will expire within two months or competences that have already expired. Thus by selecting expired competences in the menu you should be able to see the employee you just assigned the competence to.

An after holiday build and a word on current work

Today we are happy to release a holiday build for version 4.4 where we have spent the last couple of months fixing bugs and greatly improve quality overall 222 bugs fixed in 4.4 and 4.5 (more on 4.5 further down) in since the last build. And we are closing more than are found and as of today no blocking bugs are not unlooked at. 

if you are interested in that build you can get it from our support.

Among the most significant fixes you will find:

• The possibility edit CV list values in 4.4
• Fixing some IE8 rendering bugs. We have not tested ie8 full but we are not aware on any more show stoppers to use ie8 anymore.
• Fixing the login issue after being logged due to inactivity
• Appraisal now looks ok in 1024*768
• for a full list of fixes login to the extranet and download the chart of fixes

I also wanted to share with you what we are focusing on during Q3 of 2009 and a little bit abut the roadmap. We are adding more power to our team by adding a software tester and focusing on quality builds even more. Also as we are implementing SCRUM we doing a restart of the implementation by assigning one of developers as responsible for quality, this role does not mean he will fix bug. But his focus during development will be to think about architecture and design from maintenance perspective and tools to help us to automate test.

Our hopes are by increasing quality we will be able to both decrease the number of builds and also increase number the features in each release.

Immediately after the summer it will be possible to have a new version 4.5 where we are introducing our SOA framework, first out is the possibility to both read and write organizational and user data thru webservices/wcf thus enabling you build applications on our high quality hr data and reduce cost of integration. More details about this will be posted here later. Another very exiting feature is the possibility as a system admin to edit the user and organizations layout pages, this will also be covered in a later blog post.

Another cool thing we are enabling are an update to our the SCORM engine and the integration layer it will now be possible to log interactions and order custom reports to analyze your online training.

Andreas will post a blog about this shortly.

The releasenotes can beaccess thru the agresso extranet.