One of the first steps to ensure quality is to define what quality means for your product and your stakeholders. You need to establish clear and measurable quality criteria that align with your product vision, goals, and requirements. These criteria should cover both functional and non-functional aspects of your product, such as features, usability, security, scalability, maintainability, and compliance. Without defining quality criteria, you may end up with a product that does not meet the expectations or needs of your customers, users, or regulators.
Another way to ensure quality is to follow established quality standards and best practices in your product development process. Quality standards are guidelines or frameworks that help you manage and improve your product quality in a consistent and effective way. They can also help you benchmark your product against industry or customer standards and demonstrate your commitment to quality. Some examples of quality standards are ISO 9001, CMMI, Six Sigma, and Agile. However, you should not blindly adopt any standard without understanding its suitability and applicability for your product context and objectives.
Once you have defined your quality criteria and standards, you need to monitor and measure your product quality throughout your product lifecycle. You need to collect and analyze relevant quality metrics that indicate how well your product meets your quality criteria and standards. These metrics can include defect rates, customer satisfaction, user feedback, test coverage, code quality, performance, availability, and security. By tracking and reviewing these metrics regularly, you can identify and address any quality issues or gaps before they become costly or damaging.
Even with careful planning and monitoring, you may still face some unexpected or unavoidable quality risks that can affect your product quality. Quality risks are potential events or conditions that can negatively impact your product quality or prevent you from achieving your quality goals. For example, you may encounter changes in customer requirements, technical dependencies, resource constraints, market competition, or regulatory compliance. You need to proactively identify, assess, prioritize, and mitigate these quality risks using appropriate tools and techniques, such as risk registers, risk matrices, risk response plans, and contingency plans.
Another important activity to ensure quality is to conduct regular and systematic quality reviews throughout your product lifecycle. Quality reviews are formal or informal evaluations of your product quality by internal or external stakeholders, such as peers, managers, customers, users, or auditors. Quality reviews can help you validate your product quality against your quality criteria and standards, verify your compliance with quality requirements and regulations, and identify any quality improvements or corrective actions. Quality reviews can take various forms, such as inspections, audits, walkthroughs, demonstrations, or feedback sessions.
Finally, one of the most critical factors for achieving quality is to foster a quality culture in your product team and organization. Quality culture is the shared values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that support and promote quality in everything you do. Quality culture can help you create a positive and collaborative environment where everyone is committed to quality, accountable for quality, and empowered to improve quality. You can foster a quality culture by setting clear quality expectations and goals, providing adequate quality training and resources, rewarding and recognizing quality achievements, and encouraging continuous learning and improvement.
From the product compliance perspective, the common pitfalls that typically encountered during certification process are 1. Outdated test reports 2. Insufficient technical files 3. Missing document identification 4. Blurred product photos 5. Non-finalized brochure / specifications 6. Typo errors and wording faults and Etc. Need to exercise high level of scrutiny, attention to the details to counter these common pitfalls.