QUALITY CONTROL PLAN
Introduction
This draft Quality Control Plan (QCP) is designed to meet the following objectives for the Ideogenics Team Business Services Provider for Seaport-E:
- Outline the procedures to ensure SEAPORT-E regulations and procedural
requirements are followed.
- Describe the processes and tools to be used to maintain data integrity.
- Ensure standard reports are timely and accurate
- Ensure exception reports are developed and maintained
- Provide information security and data protection
The Ideogenics Team brings a comprehensive approach to managing quality across all elements of the contract. Our belief is that quality control is not a one-time event, but is a guiding principle for all services and products produced and managed by the Ideogenics Team.
Scope
The scope of this quality control plan includes the services performed by Ideogenics Team resources and the data and reports stored, defined, and presented by the web-based system. This includes managing the operational availability of the web application, ensuring SEAPORT-E users have reliable access to the reports and analytical tools. This also includes changes to the data and reports made by the Ideogenics Team during the initial implementation and ongoing changes in response to new requirements and technical direction.
Quality Control Processes
Overview
Ideogenics will implement robust quality control processes as the Business Services Provider for SEAPORT-E. Quality steps and tools will be utilized as part of each task, and will be integrated into the team – there will not be a separate quality control team or resource. A high-level view of the Ideogenics quality control processes is shown in figure 1 below. Note that each phase of a project or program has associated quality processes – this ensures that quality is addressed and assessed throughout and, that defects are identified early on when it is easier and less costly to resolve them.
Contingency Planning & Business Continuity
Part of Ideogenics quality processes is managing systems and data availability during contingencies and in times of business disruption. Ideogenics will employ a combination of techniques and tools to ensure SEAPORT-E systems and data are protected and can be quickly recovered and made operational. The first of these is to leverage a scalable and redundant deployment architecture through the use of cloud-based services, load balancers, and data replication. This architecture eliminates many single-points-of-failure inherent in legacy systems, and provides a high performance and responsive user experience.
The second process Ideogenics will implement is in the area of data management. Because data is at the core of the reports and analysis performed by the SEAPORT-E users, it is important to have additional protections on the source data. This will be implemented by generating daily database backups that are retained online to support failover needs. Weekly database backups will also be performed, with the backup data to be stored in a separate location from the production system. Also, a source code control system will be used to manage all source code, with periodic backups of all source code to be available as needed.
System Security
Ideogenics is approved to handle and store classified materials and has personnel on staff with the required clearances and certifications. In conjunction with the Ideogenics corporate security staff, the management team will ensure all staff has proper security training to manage secure facilities and equipment. In addition, Ideogenics has been approved to handle sensitive procurement materials on other contracts. Ideogenics is a strong and capable business services provider for SEAPORT-E with the security experience and attention to protect SEAPORT-E information. Ideogenics is ready and able to support the required data collection and analysis.
Ideogenics will implement security controls for the production web server and all database servers to prevent unauthorized access to any of the systems. These controls will be a combination of role-based user management in the web application and hardware and network configuration in each environment. Ideogenics has experience managing web and database applications in secure environments and will leverage this experience to protect the SEAPORT-E systems.
System Data, Enhancement, & Release Control
Managing quality is especially important during the change process. As new reports are developed, existing reports are enhanced, and underlying data definitions are created and updated, Ideogenics is committed to maintaining quality and ensuring uninterrupted access to accurate reports and analysis by SEAPORT-E users.
In our experience managing complex systems with large data dependencies, the most effective way to manage quality is using separate environments across the development, testing, and operations cycles. We will establish a set of one or more development environments for use by the SAS programmers to design and develop changes to the data and web application. Upon completion of unit testing, the updated code will be deployed to an entirely separate staging environment. The stage environment will have the same configuration as production (although with less powerful servers) to ensure that new code runs successfully. The stage environment will be used for integration and user acceptance testing. All changes must be verified and accepted on the stage environment before they are deployed to the production environment. The production environment is not connected to the stage or development environments to prevent incorrect deployments, and access to the production environment will be
closely managed by the system administrator.
Periodic Task Reviews
Part of the Ideogenics quality control program is regular review of critical processes and tasks. These reviews fall into three categories:
Operational Monitoring
Automated tools will be configured to monitor the availability and performance usage of the production website. These tools will immediately notify Ideogenics staff of any identified problem and are an essential part of the overall quality control process – ensuring high availability for the web application.
Quality Checks on Scheduled Tasks
Some tasks will occur on a scheduled basis – either automatically or with manual intervention. The Ideogenics team will review these tasks prior to execution and monitor them for completion. Two examples of these tasks are the database ETL loads which will run on a scheduled basis and the generation of monthly and quarterly standard reports. Ideogenics will implement ETL monitoring processes to ensure all ETLs complete successfully and as scheduled. Because the reports available through the website rely on accurate data, and the ETL processes populate the reporting database – ETL quality and operation is key to the overall project.
Design Reviews
As reports are developed and new metadata topics are defined, the Ideogenics Team will hold design reviews at the end of the design phase and again at the beginning of integration testing. These reviews will include all involved Ideogenics Team personnel and SEAPORT-E SMEs. The objective of the reviews is to assess compliance with SEAPORT-E regulations, confirm requirements, and finalize design and/or test plans.
Quality Control Responsibilities
The Ideogenics Program Manager has responsibility for the quality control program. The program manager will review all work product developed by the Ideogenics Team to ensure all technical requirements and SEAPORT-E regulations are met.
Specific quality control tasks will be performed by all members of the Ideogenics team with oversight by the respective subject matter expert (SME). For example, the SAS Programmer will perform unit testing for changes and/or new reports and the lead programmer will provide backup and second level review. The system administrator has responsibility for managing and monitoring the availability and performance of the website through a combination of hands-on inspection and system monitoring tools. The deputy program manager is the back-up and support for these tasks.