Quality Assurance

A description of the Contractor’s quality assurance program.

Overview
As an SEI SW-CMM ® Level 3 appraised and ISO 9001:2000 registered company, Avineon has a highly structured Quality Management System (QMS) in place. Our QA procedures are applied to a wide variety of client IT projects. The quality assurance team reports independently to Avineon's Vice President of Information Technology.

For each phase of the project, quality assurance reviews are completed to assess factors such as adherence to the development approach, schedule achievement, risk factor management, threshold assessments, and overall quality. A quality assurance team or representative reviews all project outputs and publishes exception or deviation logs. Deviations are adjudicated by the project team prior to beginning follow-on phases. Following review of project deliverables, Avineon makes any necessary corrections to rejected deliverables or presents a plan within five working days (subject to client approval) for making the required changes.

Avineon will work closely with the Navy to develop performance-monitoring programs specifically geared to each task order issued under the SeaPort-e contract. All service requirements cited by the Navy will be incorporated into the program, with metrics developed to ensure exemplary service. Avineon will:

•  Determine and record the important functional, non-functional, budgetary, and schedule requirements and constraints, which need to be tracked

•  Review the relevance, clarity, feasibility, and sufficiency of the selected goals

•  Analyze complex goals to determine sub goals to which metrics can be applied

•  Determine the metrics which will enable the sub goals to be tracked

•  Determine the basic measurements that will be used to derive the metrics

•  Produce the measurement plan

•  Check the measurement plan for consistency, clarity, appropriateness, feasibility, and completeness

•  Establish the means to collect, record, reduce, and report the planned measurements

Procedures for Complying with Government Standards
Avineon has experience in working with numerous federal agencies and is familiar with various standards and publications. At the onset of each task order, all applicable standards will reviewed and integrated into the QA Plan. It will integrate with any additional Navy quality standards that will be implemented throughout the project development lifecycle.

Techniques and Metrics for Measuring Compliance
As part of Avineon's quality assurance and process improvement initiatives, we developed and now maintain a Software Process Database which contains our measurement data. This is updated and maintained by the QA Manager with input from the project team. Measurement results are obtained through the different audits and reviews conducted throughout the lifecycle of Avineon projects. Data collected may include:

•  SQA milestone dates (planned/completed)

•  SQA work scheduled (planned/actual)

•  SQA effort expended (planned/actual)

•  SQA funds expended (planned/actual)

•  Number of noncompliance items open/closed

•  Total Number of noncompliance items

Avineon will work with the Navy to determine the best course of action for collecting and maintaining metrics for each task order issued under the SeaPort-e contract.

Approaches for Eliminating Causes of Unsatisfactory Performance
By conducting both audits (scheduled and unscheduled) and reviews (design, specification, peer, etc), quality issues will be quickly identified and reported to the affected project team members and management. Corrective action will be determined for each issue with an assigned completion date. The corrective action will be reviewed to determine the effectiveness of the corrective action and satisfactory completion.