MiLife (Imperative Health)

MiLife is an automated, web-based health behavior change system, proven to deliver significant improvements in user's levels of physical activity, weight management and associated health outcomes. It does this via a unique combination of unobtrusive lifestyle monitoring devices and patent-pending behavior change coaching algorithms deployed via the website.

Since March 2008 we have been building a development team in Ukraine to complement our UK based staff. The quality of the work being done in Ukraine was always good and we were always very happy with the cooperation we were getting from Ciklum. Towards the end of 2008 we felt that the quality of our delivery could be improved further. In consultation with our team, we decided that we needed a dedicated QA manager on the team. Ciklum helped find the right candidates and we were able to make the appointment quickly.

The QA manager's main tasks are to understand the nature of our quality process, help create test plans, carry out the testing and maintain key testing documentation. In addition, the QA manager is increasingly responsible for providing more independent, creative input into ways of automating the tests and generally improving the test process efficiency. We quickly saw the benefit of getting her on the team and working in tandem with the developers and the team leader – some of the past quality issues were resolved and the first major end-of-cycle release after her appointment was one of the smoothest, error-free ones we could remember. Everyone contributed to this success but it was quite clear to all of us the tremendous, crucial role that our new QA manager had played.

Having a full-time QA person on the team also means that we now have improved our standard of documentation which in turn means that our developers can focus a lot more on what they are best at – developing. Further, we got more transparency in the entire development process and freed up some of our PM's time, so he now can focus more on his own tasks and project managing.

The bottom line is that not long after we extended our team with a QA manager we saw two main benefits: the quality of the delivered software went up, as did productivity (initial assessment suggests an improvement in the region of 20-30%).

I would recommend others to consider bringing a dedicated QA/tester onto their team, since I clearly can see the value it has brought to date. I am certain we will continue to benefit from this going forward.

Reference date: May 2009