How Jama Software Supports Government Program Offices Part V: Test Planning
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Welcome to Part V of our government program offices series. If you haven’t already, go back and read the introduction to the government program offices series to learn more about how Jama Software supports government program offices and more about me and my qualifications. You can also read Part I, where I discuss the development of the RFI/RFP and we got approval to release the RFP, Part II on source selections, Part III where I cover contractor requirements decomposition, and Part IV, where we discuss financial management.
Welcome back to the program office blog series. You are now reading blog post six (6) on this, so congratulations on your endurance. At this point our program office and contractor have figured out the contract and the requirements. Today, we’ll dig into the test planning that happens both within the contractor and the program office (or the designated test organization).
Jama Connect has all of the requirements including the products functional and operational requirements. The contractor is responsible for building the product. As a part of that product development, the contractor will conduct a variety of unit and system level tests. Depending on the contract, the government may or may not have visibility or approval of any contractor internal testing. On the government side, there is typically both developmental (does this product meet the specifications?) and operational (can I actually use this product to do my mission?) testing.
In either case, Jama Connect can be used to build and approve the different test plans. This includes the contractor and government test plans. This allows traceability between the authoritative requirements and the testing, and allows for an easy analysis to determine if there is satisfactory test coverage of the requirements.
Jama Connect allows the creation of multiple test plans, where specific test cases can be assigned
Jama Connect allows you to document the results of the test runs within Jama Connect, allowing full visibility of whether or not the requirements were validated through testing.
One of the benefits of Jama Connect is that the contractor’s or government test teams can be independent of either the developers or the program office. Jama can be configured to limit access to or visibility of the test plans as required to ensure that independence is maintained. However, through the use of Jama Connect the testers are able to collaborate with the developers and the program office to ensure that the requirements are understood, and that the testing objective measures the products compliance to those requirements. It also allows the testings to start deriving additional requirements that are necessary to actually perform the test, and to start their own project management as required to be ready to test.
Test planning and generating test reports is a core function of Jama Connect and leveraging this capability within the program office environment is really a simple decision. The only uniqueness in this use-case is the possible need to reduce access to or visibility of the test plans, and that is easily accomplished through the built-in Jama Connect access controls.
John Allison entered the US Air Force in 1991, and spent the next 24 years working primarily as an engineer and program manager across multiple Air Force acquisition programs. He was responsible for taking user generated operational requirements and delivering a product that met the requirements, while attempting to be on schedule and on budget. This involved a significant amount of requirements analysis, requirements tradeoff analysis, RFI/RFP and contract development, and contractor technical oversight. After retiring in 2015, John joined Cisco where he led their first DoD cloud collaboration effort. Today, John is at Armis Security, a leading cybersecurity startup where he leads their federal product management. John lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife, son, three cats and one dog. When not working on public sector cybersecurity, John tries to convince non-traditional companies to enter into the US public sector market.
Latest posts by John Allison (see all)
- How Jama Software Supports Government Program Offices Part VII: Contract Recompetition - August 12, 2021
- How Jama Software Supports Government Program Offices Part VI – Contractor Deliverable Management - August 5, 2021
- How Jama Software Supports Government Program Offices Part V: Test Planning - July 29, 2021