How to Build Winning Products? The Ultimate Go-Live Checklist to Consider!
Going live with a project is always a big event for any product engineering company. It is important to make sure that everything works perfectly and quality software is delivered to the customer. However, at times you can only know more defects once the product is launched and multiple users are using it. There are two questions to ponder:
• How can we decide the type of defects that we can go live with?
• What percentage of defects are acceptable in a software?
Some of the defects discussed in this article are functional issues, performance and loading issues, usability issues, security issues, and issues pertaining to integration with external systems.
Functional Defects
When there is any deviation in developing the required functionality (as suggested by the client), we term it as a functional defect. Classification of the functional defect is done on the basis of priority of the function and severity. Severity and priority of the functional defect are, however, dependent on the project lead. Further, in order to ensure that there are no functional defects, there are a number of important considerations that one needs to follow. Firstly, the team needs to focus on the high severity and high priority defects, which can impact the software on daily basis. These needs to be fixed before the Go-live date. Further, there are certain functional defects which were not part of the original plan and are classified as Change Requests (CRs) which should also be implemented before the go-live event.
Performance and Load Defects
Performance testing assesses the performance and speed of the application. Slower loading times can hamper the user experience thereby impacting the engagement. Performance testing is therefore extremely crucial before going live with the product. Such tests are conducted using tools such as Jmeter and LoadRunner which enable the team to document the load time of the application before go-live event. Performance tests should be conducted after the functional defects are cleared to determine the response time of a single user and concurrent users on the system.
Usability defects
An intuitive and smart application with limited navigation and enhanced usability is generally well-received by the users. However, some applications have usability defects and to identify such defects a detailed usability guideline should be formulated while the product is under development. These defects should be taken care of before going live otherwise they will be counted as functional or performance defects by the testers.
Security defects
Protecting application from the vulnerabilities is a crucial thing to consider. An application may have valuable data and there could be a breach of security if the data is leaked by unethical hackers. There are several steps to security testing which can be adopted to ensure that the system in not vulnerable to attacks. At times, security teams hire external hackers who are paid to penetrate into the application and find bugs so that the same are resolved before going live.
Figure 1: Case Example before Go-Live event
It can be concluded that severity and priority of a defect are well-defined by the project leads to the internal and external stakeholders. Defects outlined in this blog aren’t exhaustive, but they are some of they key defects which if not addressed could hamper time to market or at a later date hamper the user experience. Furthermore, testing teams need to be aware of application features and business requirements thoroughly to come with separate test cases. The team should also focus on several architectural and hardware dependencies to develop exhaustive exit criteria.
