Compliance and Testing FDA, FSA, Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel-II – corporate compliance affects nearly all of us. Original Software has a way that can help ease this burden – while actually saving time and resources.

Corporate compliance measures such as FDA, FSA, Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel-II affect most companies operating in the UK and Europe today. You are probably already facing some of these labyrinthine challenges.

What you probably need is a way to make the whole process easier. And ideally, you would probably like to save a bit of money into the bargain! Well, it can be done.

An inevitability of corporate compliance is that a company has to make changes to its core IT systems, the ones it relies upon for its corporate records and key management processes and reports. Such changes might take the form of developments to existing in-house applications, or perhaps outsourcing development, or maybe buying in and installing bespoke third-party solutions.

All of these involve introducing new software to established key systems – and they all bring with them differing levels of change that must be managed in strict accordance with corporate compliance requirements. This is essential for you to be able to guarantee the stability and reliability of the core system overall. So how do you do that?

A Framework for Corporate Compliance

The simple answer is that your company has to develop its own IT best practice methodology, a QA plan that formalizes how your company handles changes to software systems. Properly implemented, such a plan will ensure that any changes to software are thoroughly tested according to pre-defined testing processes and that the testing process is fully documented in audit-ready format. In short, you need to be able to prove that the systems upon which you rely for your key management processes have been properly exercised.

This means that, for every system change, you have to be able to show what was tested, how it was tested, who it was tested by, what the results of those tests were, how any defects were handled and re-tested, and how the software was released into the live environment.

It sounds cumbersome, doesn’t it?

But it doesn’t have to be. Original Software can show you how a properly implemented and executed QA plan can not only improve software quality and contribute substantially towards your corporate compliance objectives. It can actually reduce the costs of testing your software by up to 90% - and still increase test coverage.

For more information on corporate compliance see our article in IT Jungle, or visit our whitepapers and case studies, using the links on the right. If you would like to Ask our Experts for further advice, please click the link.