Internal Quality Audits

Objective of Internal Audits
Verify that the work being performed is in accordance with QMS and effectiveness and suitability of QMS, to make sure it gives the organisation the maximum benifits. And it should ensure the continuing suitability.

Selecting an Auditor
An auditor should be formally appointed to conduct the audit to ensure the people being audited are aware that he/she has right to question and investigate. Auditor MUST be independent and must not have direct responsibility over the work being audited.

Attitude of an Auditor
Auditors are expected to Audit the processes not the people involve genuinely.

Type Of Audits

* External Audits
* Internal Audits

External Assessors have the responsibility if the system is confirmed to ISO 9001.

Documents used to support internal Audits

* Checklist to assist auditing
* Forms to record audit findings
* Process documents & tools

Internal Audit Plan
Audit Scheduling is a responsibility of MR. The schedule is recorded in Internal Audit Plan. One full Audit of the QMS should be perfromed each year.

Note: Audits in addition to those scheduled shall be performed as deemed necessay. Finding issues earlier the better.

Very Important Projects should be audited early before they have a chance to head in the wrong direction, and late when shortcuts start to happen

Training Auditors

* Internal Training
* External Training
* On-the-job training

Auditors need to be trained on their roles and expectations.

How to be a good Auditor?

* Do Audits as planned
* Do Adhoc audits frequently
* Help guys to "Make their lives" easier.
* Auditors are expected to maintain a genuine attitude towards people in line with the corporate culture.

Internal Audits should add value , not increase costs.

Tasks

* Conduct the Audit
* Raise CARs
1. Major (Significant nonconfirmance requiring major corrective action)
2. Minor (Minor nonconfirmance that can be readily corrected)
* Follow up
* Prepare Summary Report

Initiating an Audit
Project leader/ Process owner shall be informed in advance about the Audit data/time in case of a Direct Audit where audit takes place with a one to one interview with the process owner.

Before an Audit

* Review previous audits relevant to one being conducted
* Review the requirement of QMS
* Prepare a Plan for the Audit
*

During an Audit

* Identify nonconfirmances
* Suggest areas that can be improved
* Share best practices from industry and our projects
* Show guys that you are helping them to make their life easier

Note: The auditee is responsible for determining and initiating the action needed to correct nonconfirmances and to correct the root causes of nonconfirmances.

After an Audit

* Prepare a written Audit Report
* A copy of summary of Audit Report should be available for next MR

Audit the Audit Process
Audit process itself is audit (Audit the Auditors)

Be Careful
Auditing means adding value, not picking on every little detail

Important traits of common good UI

Important traits of common good UI which will be help you to test the UIs in your projects.

Check whether the following features exist in your GUIs

*Is the UI clean, unobtrusive, not busy?
*The UI shouldn’t get in the way of what you want to do.
*The functions you need or response your looking for should be obvious and be there when you expect them.
*Is the UI organized and laid out well?
*Does It allow you to easily get from one function to another?
*Is what to do next obvious?
*At any point can you decide to do nothing or even back up or back out?
*Are your inputs acknowledged?
*Do the menus or windows go too deep?
*Is there excessive functionality?
*Does It attempt to do too much?
*Do too many features complicate your work?
*Do you feel like your getting information overload?
*If all else fails, does the help system really help you?

Getting your system information

You may need to get the system information in testing projects.
There is a tool which gives your system information.

Here are the steps to install the tool and get info
1) Download the rpm suits for your OS
http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/lshw/
2) Login as a superuser (root)
3) Install the rpm
4) type $lshw -html > sysInfo.html to get the system information in HTML format

You can used following commands to get some useful network information of your system .

cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 | grep IPADDR
cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 | grep GATEWAY
cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 | grep NETMASK

There is a utility called 'lshw' that will gather and display this info for you.
It can generate system information in html format too.

(lshw -html > sysInfo.html)


The details of the tool is available @
http://ezix.org/project/wiki/HardwareLiSter

There is a list of rpms which support your OS.

You can get machine architecture by using command

$ arch

Shell Arithmetics, Date and the read statement

1. Shell Arithmetics is used to perform arithmetic operations.

Syntax:
expr op1 math-operator op2

Given below are some examples that you can try out.

$ expr 10 / 2 
$ expr  2 - 1
$ expr 2 - 10
$ expr 13 + 1
$ expr 20 \* 3   
$ expr 20 %3 

Note: There should be spaces between as shown in the Syntax listed above, if not it would be displayed as characters
e.g. $ expr 13+1 would be processed and displayed as 13+1 not 14

2. Printing current system date.

Use the following command to print the current system date.

$ echo "Today is `date`".  

Note: if you type it as shown below the system date will not be displayed only the text will be displayed. So include the word date withing single quotes.

$ echo "Today is date"  

3. read statement
Used to get input from keyboard and store into a variable.

Type the following in a shell script and test the output

$ echo "Your first name please:"
$ read fname
$ echo "Hello $fname, Welcome to BeyondM!"

Principles of interface design

Found a couple of interesting articles on principles of interface design. If you have time read them, see to what extent our products follow these principles.

http://www.vhml.org/theses/nannip/HCI_final.htm
http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/skaalid/theory/interface.htm

New ways to compress and uncompress a file/folder.

Few ways to compress and uncompress a file/folder.
As my experience it is better to use tar.bz or tar.bz2 when you really need to make free disk spaces.



.tar.bz2
UNCOMPRESS
tar jxvf FileName.tar.bz2
COMPRESS
tar jcvf FileName.tar.bz2 DirName

.bz
UNCOMPRESS
bzip2 -d FileName.bz
OR
bunzip2 FileName.bz
COMPRESS
unknown


.tar.bz
UNCOMPRESS
tar jxvf FileName.tar.bz
COMPRESS
tar cfvpj .tar.bz

.tar
UNCOMPRESS
tar xvf FileName.tar
COMPRESS
tar cvf FileName.tar DirName

.gz
UNCOMPRESS
gunzip FileName.gz
OR
gzip -d FileName.gz
COMPRESS
gzip FileName

.tar.gz
UNCOMPRESS
tar zxvf FileName.tar.gz
COMPRESS
tar zcvf FileName.tar.gz DirName

.bz2
UNCOMPRESS
bzip2 -d FileName.bz2
OR
bunzip2 FileName.bz2
COMPRESS
bzip2 -z FileName


.Z
UNCOMPRESS
uncompress FileName.Z
COMPRESS
compress FileName

.tar.Z
UNCOMPRESS
tar Zxvf FileName.tar.Z
COMPRESS
tar Zcvf FileName.tar.Z DirName

.tgz
UNCOMPRESS
tar zxvf FileName.tgz
COMPRESS
unknown

.tar.tgz
UNCOMPRESS
tar zxvf FileName.tar.tgz
COMPRESS
tar zcvf FileName.tar.tgz FileName

.zip
UNCOMPRESS
unzip FileName.zip
COMPRESS
zip FileName.zip DirName

.rar
INSTALL
RAR : http://www.rarsoft.com/download.htm
[root@www2 tmp]# cp rar_static /usr/bin/rar UNCOMPRESS rar a FileName.rar COMPRESS rar e FileName.rar

.lha
INSTALL
lha : http://www.infor.kanazawa-it.ac.jp/~ishii/lhaunix/
[root@www2 tmp]# cp lha /usr/bin/
UNCOMPRESS
lha -e FileName.lha
COMPRESS
lha -a FileName.lha FileName

.rpm
UNCOMPRESS
rpm2cpio FileName.rpm | cpio -div

.deb
UNCOMPRESS
dpkg -x FileName.deb

Using mysqldump to backup your data

You may required to get a backup of your database , tables or get database structure and upload data another database. You can use tool mysqldump for these tasks.

The tool is located @ {MySQLInstallDir}/bin eg. /usr/local/mysql/bin

Here are few useful commands

1) Get a backup of entire database with create statement

$ mysqldump [DBName]

2) Get a backup of a database's data
$ mysqldump -t [DBName]


3) Get structure of a known table
$ mysqldump -d [DBName] [TableName]

4) Get data in a table
$ mysqldump -t [DBName] [TableName]


Use option --compact for less comment
You may need to re-direct the output to a file using ">" command at the end with a file name

Improve Your Reporting Skills

Study bug reports in the tracking system for ideas on how to improve you’re reporting, for examples

• Compare the bug reports that were fixed and not fixed. Look for differences in the way they were reported. If you want yours fixed, report them like the ones that historically do get fixed.
• Read programmers (and others) answers to bug reports. What makes them confused? Angry? Unreceptive? Appreciative?
• Have a look at this http://issues.apache.org/bugwritinghelp.html
• If defect assigned party (developers, tech writer) ask more details you should improve your reporting skills.

Martin Fowlers Article on Stand-up meetings

We need to check whether we understand the purpose of stand-up meetings and use them effectively. There's an excellent article by Martin Fowler at:
http://martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStandingUp.html

Especially look at the section named: "Smells are about when things are going wrong".