How can you guarantee system development deliverables are high quality?

1 Define quality criteria

Before you start working on any system development deliverable, you need to define what quality means for that specific output. Quality criteria are the standards and expectations that you and your stakeholders agree on to measure the quality of your deliverable. They should be clear, measurable, relevant, and achievable. For example, quality criteria for a system design document might include completeness, accuracy, consistency, readability, and compliance with standards.

2 Implement quality assurance

Quality assurance is the process of ensuring that your system development deliverables meet the quality criteria throughout the project lifecycle. Quality assurance involves planning, monitoring, and controlling the quality activities and processes that affect your deliverables. Some of the quality assurance techniques that you can use are quality audits, reviews, checklists, standards, guidelines, and best practices. Quality assurance helps you prevent defects, errors, and deviations from the quality criteria.

3 Conduct quality control

Quality control is the process of verifying that your system development deliverables meet the quality criteria after they are completed. Quality control involves testing, inspecting, and evaluating your deliverables against the quality criteria and identifying any defects, errors, or deviations. Some of the quality control techniques that you can use are unit testing, integration testing, system testing, user acceptance testing, code review, peer review, and walkthrough. Quality control helps you detect and correct defects, errors, and deviations from the quality criteria.

4 Apply quality improvement

Quality improvement is the process of continuously learning from your system development deliverables and improving their quality over time. Quality improvement involves analyzing, measuring, and reporting the quality performance of your deliverables and identifying any opportunities for improvement. Some of the quality improvement techniques that you can use are root cause analysis, feedback, lessons learned, benchmarking, and metrics. Quality improvement helps you enhance and optimize the quality of your deliverables and increase their value and efficiency.

5 Use quality tools

Quality tools are the instruments and methods that you can use to support your quality assurance, quality control, and quality improvement processes. Quality tools help you collect, organize, analyze, and present quality data and information. Some of the quality tools that you can use are flowcharts, fishbone diagrams, Pareto charts, histograms, scatter diagrams, control charts, and dashboards. Quality tools help you visualize and communicate the quality status and issues of your deliverables and facilitate decision making and problem solving.

6 Involve quality stakeholders

Quality stakeholders are the people who have an interest or influence in the quality of your system development deliverables. Quality stakeholders include your customers, users, sponsors, managers, team members, and suppliers. Involving quality stakeholders in your system development process helps you understand their needs, expectations, and feedback regarding the quality of your deliverables. It also helps you build trust, collaboration, and alignment among the quality stakeholders and ensure their satisfaction and acceptance of your deliverables.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?