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Software Quality Management
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Software Quality Management
What is Software Quality Management?
The old adage goes that if it compiles, it must work, right?
Software Quality Management is a set of processes that minimize the
risk of your software deliverable being rejected by the customer due to various
degrees of bugs existing in the delivered product. The quality process is
not an exact science, but fortunately, is a maturing process today. It is
an accepted industry belief that the sooner you can find bugs, the cheaper
and faster it is to eliminate them within a software product. There are
several processes that are becoming best practices in the industry.
Namely:
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Upstream quality checks
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Upstream test-based development
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Downstream tiered test-scripts based on requirement-documents (Verification)
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Automated testing
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Effective beta test (Validation) planning
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Staged bug-occurrence tracking and trending
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Customer satisfaction tracking and trending
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A certification and signoff process
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A tangible 'library' of past signed-off products
How do we know if we can do more to improve our product quality?
You'll know if your organization needs to improve your testing procedures if any
of the following sound oh-so-too-familiar:
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Customers want to sue you.
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Every week is a new fire to put out somewhere.
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Test scripts? How do we make test scripts? Doesn't that take a long
time?
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Documented requirements? We stopped doing that because it was too
time-consuming.
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We don't document requirements because we are doing Agile Development!
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Your support staff is greater than 9% of your companies overall budget.
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Your programmers are the only people testing the software.
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There is nothing documented that defines at what point the software is
'released.'
Do any of the above scenarios occur in your organization?
Isn't Quality Management really just good Product/Project Management?
Effective Product Management ensures the product is relevant to the customers
needs. Quality Management ensures the product performs the way it was
designed. In other words, Quality Management (Verification) is an
effort to document and certify that we built what we thought we wanted to
build, whereas Product Management (Validation) is an effort to document and
certify that what we built is what the customer wanted.
Recent Posts
on Software Quality Management...
The Three P’s of a Quality Management System (3/28/2008)
A Quality Management System, sometimes referred to as a Total Quality Management (TQM) System, is a simple concept that will dramatically improve software production quality over time.
Companies that don’t have a quality system are commonly reacting to production and support issues due to omissive events.
A simple rule of thumb is to ask yourself how many fires your development team has put out this [...]
Anti-Values (3/5/2008 1)
I was sitting in a KFC eating lunch, reading the slogans muraled on the wall. This particular KFC is supposedly the first KFC in America. Yes, it’s in Utah. Along with some chicken legs and a drink, you can enjoy a small exhibit showing Colonel Sander’s original briefcase, white suite, shoes, etc.
One mural read, “Somehow [...]
Three-dimensional value systems (1/2/2008 1)
What is a value system?
As of late, corporations have discovered that mission-statements are only somewhat helpful in providing direction to a company. Being strategic in nature, they don’t provide enough detail to govern tactical decisions made by the corporate employees on a daily basis.
To answer this need, value-statements, and value-systems have come into vogue. Many companies have [...]
Great Mission Statements (12/28/2007)
Jack Welch, in his book, Winning, talks about how to create great mission statements.
He says most mission statements are dull, uninspired, and even unhelpful. Most groups write their mission statement to describe only what they are in business to do. While this is not wrong, it creates a whole bunch of mission statements that all look the same among [...]
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