Functional Reliability

A functionally reliable system ensures that each feature delivers what the user expects each time they use it.  It accepts any reasonable input tolerates everything else.

Key Questions

• How tolerant is your system of different user habits and skill levels?
• Do users believe your system is predictable and substantially free of defects?
• Are they able to complete their objectives within the system?

Functional Completeness

Users will evaluate your system based on it doing everything they expect it to each time they interact with it.  These expectations may come from many sources - your competitors, other applications they use, even other parts of the same system.  When it doesn't live of to those expectations, or require the user do significant work before or after using a feature, consistency and accuracy problems are created.

We combine several techniques to look for feature gaps that can cause user perception problems.  This includes looking at user processes as well as more specific implementation details.  In addition to working with the current state of the system, we also focus on refining your development process to ensure new gaps aren't created.

Functional Correctness

In this area we focus on whether the functionality provided works as envisioned every time.  This encompasses most traditional software defects.

We look the process from conceptualization to delivery to detect and eliminate defect insertion points, the place where the train first goes off the tracks.  Depending on your current development process, we find cost effective methods of consistently avoiding defect introduction that will work with how your team works.

Supportability

There are some features your product needs so that your support staff can effectively operate it and can provide great customer service.  Because these features are for an internal audience they are often sacrificed for customer-facing capabilities.  In some cases the changes aren't to the product itself but the introduction of internal off-the-shelf software.

We identify opportunities to extend your product that offer substantial improvements in support cost or effectiveness.  These may range from integration with existing or new internal support tools to software instrumentation changes in the product.