Independent software vendors (ISVs) face a frenetic pace today to deliver innovative software releases to market. New forces such as improving the investment balance towards new (versus legacy) products, delivering a compelling cross-platform user experience, shifting to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, and enabling mobility are outstripping the traditional approaches to product quality management (PQM) where Quality through Inspection in a best effort model has not given expected results and has almost always fallen short to achieve desired product quality and customer satisfaction in agile models.

Symphony Services has developed an innovative Product Quality Management solution to solve these problems, and offers PQM as a managed service to Independent Software Vendors, software enabled businesses and companies whose products contain embedded software. Symphony offers PQM services with Outcome Certainty^TM, a flexible engagement model designed to ensure alignment with clients’ ultimate business objectives.

Symphony’s Product Quality Management as a service is made up of five fundamental sets of capabilities, highly tailored to our clients’ specific needs.

• Early-stage build management and certification – Improve your build success rates while reducing re-work due to problem identification early in the development cycle thereby increasing the efficiency and productivity of your teams. Reduce your initial defect escape rate to less than 20%. This is especially true for companies with a multi-site build model.
• Dynamic automation and regression testing – Deliver increased quality to your end customers by faster and frequent testing. This can increase your test coverage, reduce resource constraints of manual testing, and give you more flexibility to adapt to changing requirements. This is achieved in every daily build in an 8-10 hour cycle.
• Experience-based usability and performance testing – Improve usability and performance, ensuring that you meet commercial grade software requirements for performance, scale and availability consistently and guaranteeing high levels of customer satisfaction.
• Cloud-based development and testing – Enable optimum utilization of your IT infrastructure by moving to a cloud-based model for development and testing, thereby optimizing cost and moving a) from a CAPEX to OPEX model and b) moving from fixed and dedicated environments to flexible and on-demand provisioning of a variety of environments. Managing your peak infrastructure requirements with a cloud approach reduces overall costs and avoids underutilized infrastructure.
• Causal-oriented problem management – Use dashboards to measure your product quality and then fine-tune it by performing a causal analysis on the field defects and taking corrective and preventive actions, thereby improving the productivity of your teams.

Symphony delivers this service as a managed service through its Centre of Excellence (CoE) staffed by specialist in different services such as build management, code analysis, test automation, performance engineering and Cloud Computing. This model also brings benefit of flexible capacity to address peaks and valleys as demanded by business.

Symphony Services approach to PQM as a managed service addresses all of these concerns and delivers the following benefits:

• Increase pace of innovation – Deliver new innovations to market faster by reducing the time to market in your development lifecycle by up to 30% via agile methodologies and consistent release processes. This accelerates the return on investment on new product development.
• Reduce costs and improve resource utilization – Reduce your labor costs by 15-20% through optimized rationalization and utilization of build, release, QA resources and tools
• Enrich user experience and increase customer satisfaction - Improve usability and performance of your product and increase customer acceptance levels and satisfaction by performing early-stage and automated quality checks.
• Leverage the cloud – Move from a CAPEX to an OPEX model for IT infrastructure by centralizing and virtualizing hardware infrastructure and creating a private cloud to manage peaks in development and testing via PQM as a managed service. Reducing your CAPEX cost by 20-25%.
• Leverage best practices and latest tools – Deliver higher quality leading to further savings of 25-30%% by leveraging best practices around planning, estimation, metrics collection and process improvement

All these benefits are based on the core model of Outcome Certainty^TM, which is about getting the results you require to meet your business objectives. It’s about achieving goals, driving innovation and bringing predictability to costs, schedules and quality of the outsourced software product engineering process. Symphony Services ensures that our clients’ maximize the ROI from their engineering investments and deliver market-leading products to drive their success.