What is your process for monitoring and controlling quality in your project?

It is important to understand ‘why’ you are focusing on quality to begin with. Too often, we see folks talking about quality without a clear intent on how a focus on quality can be a tremendous tool to help de-risk and accelerate product development and commercialization.

Defining quality is pivotal for project success. It transcends subjectivity, rooted in customer and stakeholder needs. Quality attributes like functionality, usability, and security must align with project goals. Establishing metrics—defect rate, customer satisfaction—offers tangible benchmarks. Regularly assessing actual against expected results ensures a proactive approach, fostering continuous improvement. In essence, quality, when quantifiable and aligned with objectives, becomes a robust foundation for project excellence.

In defining quality for any software products, I consider it crucial that the software not only adheres to functional specifications but also excels in user experience, reliability, and efficiency. Quality, in my view, encompasses ease of use, minimal bugs, and consistent performance in diverse scenarios. For instance, in creating a mobile app, high quality would be reflected in its quick responsiveness, clean and engaging user interface, and its ability to function smoothly across different devices and operating systems, thereby providing users with a reliable and enjoyable experience.

Planning quality ensures a proactive approach to project excellence. Crafting a comprehensive quality management plan delineates roles, processes, tools, and resources. It incorporates compliance with regulatory and industry standards, fostering legal and ethical integrity. Strategic planning for quality audits and reviews becomes integral, verifying product and process quality. A robust documentation and reporting system ensures transparency, facilitating timely issue resolution. In essence, a well-structured quality plan not only ensures adherence to standards but also cultivates a culture of continuous improvement throughout the project lifecycle.

First, identify the central goal(s) of the product or feature. You also should understand the needs of the stakeholders better than they do. That means speaking with the day-to-day users and hearing from them. Develop a rapport with those users as they'll be the ones who know the actual problems vs the ones that make it up the food chain to the stakeholders. After getting feedback from users, stakeholders, and product as well as using your knowledge of the business, establish a central driving set of principles that define how you monitor and QC. Build out a suite of quality-focused tests designed to ensure those central principles are adhered to and followed. Those core pillars should develop over time with the product/feature.

In planning quality for my software products, I start by defining clear quality objectives, such as specific performance metrics for a web app or user experience targets for a mobile app. I select technologies and tools that support these goals, focusing on robust testing frameworks to ensure functionality and usability. The strategy includes comprehensive testing at all stages and regular quality reviews, integrating continuous improvement in the development cycle. This ensures the product isn't just functional, but also excels in user experience and reliability. This structured approach to quality is key in developing software products that meet user expectations and achieve market success.

Executing quality activities demands adherence to the established plan. Application of selected tools—checklists, inspections, tests—facilitates data collection and analysis. Regular use of predefined metrics ensures continuous evaluation against set standards. Incorporating quality audits and reviews becomes essential, validating product and process quality. This iterative approach, with a focus on identification and documentation of issues, fosters a dynamic quality management system. By consistently monitoring outcomes and adapting as needed, a project can proactively address challenges, ensuring sustained quality throughout its lifecycle.

In addition to following established quality-focused test plans, you'll want to perform routine audits and qualitative analysis of those findings. This is one of the most important areas of quality control and one that is routinely left to analytics teams. Know how to read and understand data. A quality control team should be able to read between the lines and find areas of optimization and improvement. Ensure you have prior data to compare to or at least a basic idea. Furthermore, it's also important for QC teams to understand that not all issues can be surfaced through data. I highly encourage QC to embed themselves in teams and use the features/products themselves for a limited time to get a feel of day-to-day performance and UX.

In my approach to quality in software products, I actively implement our quality standards throughout the development lifecycle, especially leveraging modern automated CI/CD processes. This involves rigorous code reviews for maintainability, comprehensive automated testing to catch bugs and performance issues, and consistent monitoring of user experience aspects. The use of CI/CD allows for continuous integration of quality checks and quick deployments, ensuring any issues are identified and resolved swiftly. Post-release, user feedback is integral to identify areas for improvement. This proactive and iterative approach ensures our software not only meets but exceeds quality expectations, delivering an exceptional user experience.

Quality control is the capstone, necessitating corrective and preventive actions based on detected issues. Implementing necessary changes ensures the product aligns with or surpasses standards. The iterative process includes updating quality data, plans, and documents to reflect improvements. Transparent communication with stakeholders, including reporting results and seeking feedback, enhances accountability and fosters a collaborative environment. This closed-loop approach not only addresses immediate concerns but also establishes a foundation for ongoing quality optimization, ensuring that the product continually meets or exceeds the set quality standards and criteria.

QC teams need to establish themselves as a central authority. They are subject matter experts; they have to be to do their jobs. The best performing start-ups and companies understand the importance of QC and QA teams and will incorporate them as a major contributor within their SDLC. QC teams, you need to establish a strong feedback loop between product, eng, design, and QA. That could be a weekly sync, that could be JIRA, or both! The goal is to share your findings, thoughts, and suggestions with the product and engineering teams which will be incorporated into the improvement and development of the product/feature. Lastly, when working cross-functionally in these feedback loops, address gaps in understanding with compassion and kindness!

In my quality control approach for software products, I integrate our quality standards within the automated CI/CD pipeline. Key practices include comprehensive code reviews for functionality, extensive automated testing for bugs and performance, and monitoring user experience aspects. The CI/CD process enables continuous quality checks and quick issue resolution. Post-release, we focus on incorporating user feedback for ongoing improvements. This ensures our software consistently delivers a high-quality user experience and maintains strong performance, aligning with our commitment to excellence in software development.

It cannot be said enough. Quality management is an investment in your product development efforts. There is no single focus that has the same ability to de-risk and accelerate your product development roadmap as you work towards predictable product development outcomes.

QC and QA teams are some of the most underutilized teams at SaaS and software companies. Strong QC and QA teams are longterm investments in the security of your GTM plan. They protect you from embarrassing outages, 2am phone calls to the client, and so much more. When you build support for QA and QC into your SDLC, you're building a strong foundation for your product to rest on. Agile is all about moving fast and being able to iterate quickly; QA and QC are the backbone your product needs to make that possible.