Quality Software - It’s possible! Preparing your organization for Software Quality Assurance
Tags : Software Quality, QA necessity, User acceptance, Client satisfaction
Growth and Quality
Most software startup organizations start with a few software projects but gradually they grow in:
- Number of concurrent active projects; and
- Number of people working on a project.
With growth, it becomes more and more challenging to produce quality software.
The project managers, now, have to equip themselves with new task of maintaining the software quality and “assuring” their clients of the same. This combined process is termed as “Software Quality Assurance” or SQA.
Defining Quality
But the challenge does not end here. As expected, software quality is a qualitative term, and it is not easy to quantify it. Software Quality is defined as the fitness for use of software product. Put in simple English, it simply means, software should “do” what it is “supposed to do”. Quality may be hard to define and impossible to measure but is very easy to recognize. If its there, it can not be seen, but if it is not there, its absence is easily recognized.
Many books have been written to quantify “software quantity”, but in true measure, it has only one reference - User Acceptance; also termed as “Client Satisfaction”.
If the users of the software are satisfied, the goal of Software Quality Assurance is achieved.
Everything comes with a price tag
The next challenge faced by project managers is even more daunting. Clients maintain high quality expectations while continuously negotiating a lower budgetary and time estimate. In today’s competitive market, it becomes imperative for project managers to educate the client about software quality and include the additional effort estimates in the project costs.
As a general observation, assuring software “quality” can take up to 40% of project resources, but only up to 5% is initially allocated to it. “Software Quality Assurance” is also one of the major reasons towards slipping timelines and late delivery.
A necessary evil
The necessity of producing quality software is, generally, not understood until late in the project. And then, starts the inevitable process of engaging QA managers and software testers.
But, SQA review at the fag end of the project will only result in rework and lagging timelines. The procedures and practices to ensure software quality need to be integrated from the inception of project. In fact, it even starts before the project inception by educating the client about the company’s policies and practices about stringent quality procedures.
Do not look upon “software quality” as a hidden expense, rather look up to it as company asset, and this will soon reflect in the level of customer statisfaction.
Epilogue
Let’s start with documenting each and every step of the software life cycle, and planning the schedules with quality procedures in place.
In the next article, we will discuss standard QA practices and procedures.
