Component Outsourcing, Quality Risks, and Testing: Factors and Strategies for Project Managers

I’ll illustrate the factors and the strategies with a hypothetical project. In this project, assume you are the project manager for a bank that is creating a Web application that allows homeowners to apply for a home equity loan on the Internet. You have two component vendors. You buy a COTS database management system from one vendor. You hire an outsourced custom development organization to develop the Web pages, the business logic on the servers, and the database schemas and commands to manage the data. Let’s see how you can recognize the factors that create quality risks, and the strategies you can use to manage those risks.