Improving the quality of manual verification procedures

Abstract

This thesis was done for a company that designs and produces patient monitoring devices. These devices are classified as medical devices, meaning that their design, implementation and documentation are bound by ISO standards and FDA regulations that demand for high quality and preciseness. For this thesis, the focus was on the documentation of instructed manual testing, manual verification procedures.

The purpose of this thesis was to come up with recommendable improvements for manual verification procedures that will reduce the amount of wasteful corrective actions stemming from erroneous documentation or execution of verification. The improvements that were arrived at include ways to make the procedures themselves more robust, but the more impactful recommendations concern practices that originally generated bad documentation.

A large portion of the work towards giving improvement recommendations was first getting accustomed with the various details related to software development and testing, requirements engineering and standards compliance. Once a reasonable amount of background knowledge was accumulated, a method for investigating the current process of verification procedure creation was developed and carried out. The most suitable way of gathering information was found to be the in-depth interviewing of professionals. The interview questions were based on the preliminary understanding of verification engineering gained from relevant literature and work experience as a manual tester.

The improvements proposed in this thesis were formed with a long-lasting impact in mind, with an acknowledgement of lean practices; the idea of getting effective results using few resources. While their implementation might show an increase of effort during the early phases of the workflow, the whole life cycle of verification procedures is estimated to be a lighter burden with an added increase in quality.