Talk Abouts

An Interview with EMG’s Bob Soleimani

By Amanda Vande Brake

Even the most carefully laid plans can be for naught if a solid Quality Assurance process is not part of a project’s development lifecycle. Led by Bob Soleimani, EMG’s Quality Assurance team ensures its clients receive the products they were promised, upholding EMG’s core value of precision as well as its reputation for client satisfaction at every stage.

EMG’s Content Director Amanda Vande Brake sat down with EMG’s Sr. Quality Assurance Engineer Bob Soleimani to learn from the expert how vital advanced QA processes are to ensuring success for EMG’s wide range of technology-driven marketing and business solutions, including enterprise content management systems, custom digital asset management systems and search engine marketing landing pages and microsites.

EMG: How long has quality assurance, as the comprehensive discipline we’ve been talking about, been around?

Soleimani: Quality as a concept has been around for a long time; however, with the establishment of ISO 9000 guidelines, it started to take a more structured form. In software, it is directly tied to the emergence of the technology industry. And, as with any other technology concept, it is still an evolving concept. If you want to go back, they say, although it remains up in the air, that Apollo 11 was the very first structure software that was actually developed in the U.S. It consists of millions and millions lines of code, there was a vigorous quality assurance process involved, and it was the most successful aerospace project the U.S. had seen at that time.

Thereafter, we had the evolution of the web and the technology boom of the ‘90s. And through that process, a lot of people started to realize that the product and its quality started to matter because technology started to become a form of the commodity. Quality mattered to the end consumer in the hardware and software arenas especially.  Then, little by little, more attention started to be paid to quality when ecommerce came about, and everyone was intent on making money on the Web. So, they put up a website without properly planning for capacity, load, performance and functionality. Then, during Christmas time a few years back, the Toys R Us website crashed from being overwhelmed with more traffic than anticipated visiting the website. From then on, people started paying much more attention to quality assurance surrounding technology.

EMG: Would you say there is a difference between “quality assurance” and “quality control”?

Soleimani: There is. As a matter of fact, quality control is effectively the process of qualifying the very end product and preventing a defective product from going out the door. So, it’s mostly used in manufacturing lines and for technology products. Quality control is also very reactive. When you look at manufacturing, the product is coming to the end of its development process, and someone is sitting on the line, checking it for possible defects before they put a stamp of approval on it and ship it out the door.  Quality assurance is about the entire process. It is about improving production and the associated processes to minimize issues that could lead to defects to begin with. Quality assurance intends to create a systematic set of practices to ensure with great degree of confidence that the requirements are accurately established and the product conforms to the requirements. Quality assurance as a process is also initiated from the very beginning – from product or project concept to development to review to deliver. We make sure that every single step of the way, the product or process is upholding our standard of quality. Those are the main differences between the two.

EMG: So, there is a significant difference between a product testing process and, what EMG offers, a comprehensive quality assurance process.

Soleimani: Yes. Quality assurance encompasses the whole overall picture of the product life cycle. Quality assurance starts from the very inception of the product. Say for example, in our line of work, the concept stage drives the entire process. Quality assurance engineers are involved at that stage to listen to the concept and point out any potential quality issues before a concept is finalized. Then, we are involved in the requirements process, the design process and the content development process – all the way to the end when quality control comes into play. This is when our main objective is to verify the end product turned out as planned, find its defects and ensure the defects are addressed before the product goes out the door.

EMG: It seems to me that QA is misunderstood. . .

Soleimani: That is very true. There is a misperception and, as we talked about earlier, confusion between what the differences are between quality assurance and quality control. But, there is no misunderstanding its value once you understand its place in the process. If you look at the most successful agencies, they put a lot of weight on quality assurance and that flaws have been eliminated as much as humanly possible and the end product actually goes through a vigorous review before it rolls out the door. So, it’s easy to distinguish between the shops that actually do this and the shops that don’t. In the shops that don’t incorporate QA, the end product normally breaks down after a while and probably doesn’t meet certain industry requirements. The shop then normally goes through a number of variations and a number of patches to get certain issues fixed which leads to a number of alterations or versions of the software.

At EMG, though, I work very closely with the project management and technology teams and am involved in every single aspect of many of our projects. And, it’s no coincidence, but we’ve noticed that we don’t normally revisit these projects or get complaints from the clients or visitors. That’s the difference. It’s been proven by a number of different studies that the long-term ROI of products that actually had QA and quality control involved in their development life cycle is far greater than those that didn’t.

EMG: Let’s say a prospective client is looking into EMG and sees we have a QA department that’s involved in the beginning versus an agency that doesn’t have a QA team and relies on developers to just check their work. What is the value in EMG providing QA?

Soleimani: The key word is precision. We effectively assure that the client’s product is going to be vigorously tested, and we look at it from every single aspect from concept to rollout. Every step of the way, a process has been put into place to assure that not only the process, but the end product is going to meet certain criteria. And that’s what distinguishes certain shops often called “cowboy shops” which are fast, and turn around a product quickly before disappearing from the face of the earth so that if a client has a problem with the product, there is no version to roll back to.  Agencies and organizations that are very process oriented like EMG make sure that the process is followed from the concept to finish, and in every aspect of it, there is a quality assurance that takes place to make sure the end product meets every single specific requirement of the client.

EMG: What would you say are some of the most innovative or progressive ways to approach QA?

Soleimani: Over the past few years, the whole concept of “agile” has emerged in the software and development arena to embrace frequent analysis and optimization. We’ve come to realize that products don’t have as long of a life cycle as long as they did previously. So, as you notice with giants like Microsoft, there is a much less time between software releases. For example, Windows 3.1 lived for quite a few years and then Windows 95 for 3 years, then ‘98 lived less before XP was introduced and so on. That’s true for every single software application that’s out there. And because of this move to an agile approach, quality assurance includes documenting still, but you don’t over document; you develop, but you don’t over develop. The importance of quality assurance in agile is that it’s involved in the software development processes from day one. So it’s code, QA, code, QA, and so on. These have been the most significant advances that have come about recently.

EMG: Are there more innovative or progressive ways to do bug, defect or error resolution?

Soleimani: There are hundreds of tools out there for people to use, but the important thing is to use that tool as a means of communication between QA and the product development team and as the methodology of having a track record for a product in regards to how many bugs are out there. Every single one of these tools effectively does that. There are some comprehensive tools like automated testing and more comprehensive tools that encompass the whole testing process.

EMG: How are clients involved in the quality assurance process? Could a client ever expect to handle QA themselves?

Soleimani: What clients normally do is acceptance testing. The content management system or campaign microsite comes to them, they check the product and accept it. What we do here is multiple layers of testing, including what is known in the industry as “white-box testing” which is effectively testing on a code level to verify that the code is sound. Then in the majority of cases, we do some automated testing which includes determining whether or not there are broken links, forms accept information as expected, the content matches the page and is in the appropriate location, et cetera. There is a multitude of things we can check in a relatively short period of time that would take the client forever to do.

Last and most importantly is the performance testing of the site that a client will probably will never be able to manage on their own. We do some testing and monitor the behavior of the site and server to see how the code is performing.

EMG: What would you say is one of the biggest topics of interest in the QA world right now?

Soleimani: One thing that a lot of people are asking about is automated testing. The two things you have to understand about automated testing is that it is one of the most innovative tools ever introduced in the quality assurance arena. It reduces the costs of quality assurance, and it can do some thorough testing; however, it can get too expensive over the long run because there’s going to be maintenance of the code and the startup of the platform and on and on.

One of the main things to know about automated testing is that effectively you are scripting and coding in order to test the code. So who’s going to test the code that you are preparing? That has always kind of been a ping-pong question. You’re effectively trusting a system to do the right thing.

So the one thing people should always remember, given today’s shortened product life cycle, the best approach to QA is becoming more a combination of both – automated and manual testing which is what we do at EMG. And so for example, when we’re going to test a site for compliancy, there are a number of automated tools that can be used; however, at the end, there are certain aspects of the process that should be done manually – not that it has to get done manually – but it’s more accurate and precise if done manually by a qualified person.