We understand that quality eLearning projects help customers achieve and sustain human performance; therefore quality is taken very seriously. Quality results are ensured in several ways i.e. at the project level and at the corporate level. The corporate quality program begins with the strict Project Management Methodology (PMM). This methodology establishes the way we manage and execute projects to provide services and solutions for customers. Through our PMM’s processes, quality measures and knowledge sharing; our project managers and development resources are highly organised, disciplined and effective.
Integrating the SAT process for eLearning design with the methodology identifies the workflow for the course development. The result is an “actionable” work of ordered activities presented in phases and this is distributed and tracked through our Online ERP tool “Whizible”.
We manage all our projects through Whizible that integrates our processes and project management into a single framework.
- This framework gives our customers a high level overview of project status, quality metrics and variances online.
- It brings complete transparency in the process and provides our customers online access to the most updated information on their projects on a 24x7 basis.
- It is also used as an online bug tracker to log issues. This is maintained as a single point of all issues for later analysis.
Our PMM has separate work streams for quality management and project management activities to further highlight and streamline the quality with key elements of design, development, delivery and implementation. This too is delivered through Whizible that also allows collaboration between customer teams and our development teams.
The key people conducting project level quality management are the project managers, team leads and third eye reviewers. Each project (regardless of type, level of effort or the required work) is assigned a project manager. The project manager is primarily responsible for quality on an assigned project.
We follow two phases in our development cycle to ensure quality of the products:
- Quality Assurance is the process of fault prevention through process design and auditing by creating processes, procedures, tools etc. to prevent errors from occurring. Templates, Checklists, Styleguides to ensure that the product is conformant to the defined approach.
- Quality Control/Testing is the process of examining product against pre-determined criteria to measure conformance. This involves testing against Test case by third eye QA team.
Testing is a key component of our Quality Management Process. This includes testing of any deliverables in the Expected Operating Environment (EOE). The EOE is established based on the technical specifications provided by the customer. Based on their requirements this will include checks for content, graphics, audio, video, usability, accessibility, browser, operating system, SCORM and Section 508 compatibility.
We test SCORM compatibility using the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) SCORM compatibility Test Suite internally on Moodle LMS. AICC compliance is necessarily tested on an AICC compliant Learning Management System provided by our customers.Documents for Quality Control and Assurance
We use various process documents not only to maintain quality but to continuously monitor and ascertain gaps and determine areas of improvement. These are continuously used to improve the quality of output, people and productivity. The most significant process documents are as follows:
Test case:
This document captures details such as reference materials to be used during QA, elements that need to be checked (graphics, content, audio, video, multi platform and browser compatibility) and usability. It also captures specific inputs received from the customer that the QA process should adhere to before the product is released to the customer.
QA bug tracker:
The Online Bug Tracker of “ Whizible” is used to capture bugs and issues during the QA phase of the project. This tool is used as the single point to log issues (by our customers as well as our internal QA team). The tool captures issues, bugs and enhancements, if any. It also allows the testers and reviewers capture bugs and issues from Content, Visual Design, Navigation, Functionality and Usability point of view. The bugs can also be captured and logged based on their severity (low, medium or critical). The bug tracker also enables the tester to assign bugs/issues to specific individuals in the team for fixes.
QA analysis reports:
The bug tracker tool also has feature that helps the QA Leads to create various analysis reports. It can create automatic reports that can classify the bugs based on Visual Design, Content, Functionality, Usability, etc. It can also create domain-wise reports (Visual Design, Instructional Design and Technology). These reports enable us to identify and carry out specific training and orientation programs to reduce quality issues in projects and further improve the quality of our people.
Version Controlling System
We use SVN server that has been installed in our data server where all the project files are stored. The SVN takes care of managing the content as well as versioning them. It maintains the versioning of each file that has been placed in the server. It also provides the option to roll back to any of the previous versions of a file. The SVN server has a user authentication to access the data from the server.
TortoiseSVN (a client access to the SVN server) is installed on the individual system to communicate to the server. It is used by each team member to add the files to server, checkout the files from the server and commit the latest files to the server.
Following are the activities performed by the SVN administrator in the SVN server:
- Repository creation: Creating the project repository on the SVN server
- Creating the user names and passwords
- Providing the access details to the project team
Following are the activities performed by the Project Manager:
- Allocating the project to the team members and requesting the SVN administrator to provide access to the project team members
- Tracking the progress of the project and ensuring latest files are saved in the data server
Following are the activities performed by the individual users using TortoiseSVN:
- Adding the new files to the server
- Checking out the latest files from the server
- Committing the latest/changed files back to the server
The above said approach ensures that besides version control, only the team members aligned to a specific project have access to the required files.
