At Helm our primary concern is the quality and usability of our software. The desire to deliver a solid and stable product to you is our utmost priority and responsibility.
Quality Assurance in software, especially software delivered as a service, borrows heavily from the processes developed for chemical and electrical engineering & manufacturing, such as ISO 9001/27001 and DIN EN 45001. As a matter of fact, we’renearing completion of our ISO 9001/27001 accreditation.
The process we follow is clear and well defined and starts with, of course you, the customer. We listen to you – because you inspire our products. As we receive feedback or ideas from you and the market, it is first organized and sorted, and then later validated across an expert group of professionals working in the maritime industry. This becomes the basis for what we call the backlog.
After each requirement in the backlog is vetted by our Product team it’s pushed to a queue for development and within a short period of time it’s built by one of our software Engineers.
The first step of the process is peer review. This step, borrowed from scientific research, involves an impartial Engineer reviewing the sensibility, quality and appropriateness of the original Engineer’s work. If the impartial engineer has an issue with the quality of the other Engineer’s work, a discussion and compromise is reached to best fulfill the backlog requirement.
Then, a Quality Assurance team member tests not only the requirement and the fulfillment of its acceptance criteria, but also its effects on the overall user experience – this part is known as regression testing.
At this point the work is handed off to our continuous integration and deployment system which is a set of automated processes that check for regressions, small bugs, performance issues and memory leaks on all the platforms currently supported by Helm CONNECT.
The next step involves the Product team verifying that the requirement achieves the specified market requirements. This is done by taking the new feature out to a selected portion of the market, demonstrating it and verifying its usefulness with the end user.
