How can you maintain quality in SDLC?

Ensuring software quality is like baking a cake—define your quality requirements before you start mixing ingredients. Clearly outline what the finished product should look like, taste like, and how it should satisfy your audience (users). Just as a recipe guides you through each step, quality requirements guide the development process, outlining the desired features, performance, and user experience. Regularly check your "baking progress" against these requirements to catch any issues early on, ensuring that the final product meets everyone's expectations and tastes great!

Ensuring quality in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) primarily involves thorough requirements gathering, validation(review), and documentation. Collaboration with stakeholders to grasp their needs and expectations effectively.

To ensure the quality in SDLC, We need to take the following points into consideration: 1. Work and communicate with the dev and product team to stand on the same line of understanding. 2. Make sure the needed requirements are all clear and comprehensive as much as possible. 3. Determine the border lines that you will use to create your quality tests around them. 4. Think of the needed environment if it is available for your work or not. 5. Ensure that the preconditions for your tests are available. 6. Try to mimic all the real user scenarios. 7. Think of the further impact of every scenario and check if it is as expected or not. 8. Make your work organized and traceable. 9. Provide the needed reports. 10. Keep it simple.

Assuming we are agile, the shift left approach, TDD, and quick feedback mechanisms during development are a good way to achieve. The implementation depends on the nature of the project though. The leadership team should drive and not hesitate to experiment, eventually things will smoothen and a process will be in place.

For each stage of the SDLC quality standards needs to be clearly defined.For example: 1.Requirements Analysis: Clear and Complete Requirements 2.Design Phase: Develop detailed design plan that aligns with the requirements. Includes architectural, UI/UX and database design 3.Coding Standards and Reviews: Define and enforce coding standards to ensure consistency and readability in the codebase. Conduct regular code reviews to catch bugs, ensure compliance with coding standards and share knowledge among team members 4.Testing Phase: Clearly defined Acceptance Criteria and Entry/Exit point of testing 5.Defect Management: Clearly defined Defect Tracking process and root cause analysis 6.Documentation: Maintain comprehensive living documentation

Ask the question what does quality mean? Is it the integrity of the system, architecture or application? Is it customer and client experience? Is it quality code metrics and results? All of these are important and valid and finding and defining what quality means is critically important for design and scoping.

One can refer Books and related. i would like to sum up with my experience. 1- Requirement Analysis ( freezing req scope) 2- PlanningTest 3- Performing Test 4- Quality Audit/inspection ( Validation) 5- Requirement Conformance 6- Esclations/ change management 7- Time/schedule Management. 8- Documentation

Quality assurance is from start to finish important to implement through the entire SDLC process. In design quality assurance should be considered in a usability and sustainable fashion, development quality assurance should be defined by process to ensure quality code either through clean code, secure code and tested code. QA quality assurance should be defined by robust tests and at the minimum requirement included the breadth of the entire application or application suite. There are many things to consider here but it’s important to make sure quality is understood and define at each step of the process to help ensure it’s not overlooked.

I'd like to mention an free test management integration for Jira called QAlity. There's also the paid version but the free version let us create and manage test plans and test cases written in the imperative way.

Maintaining quality in SDLC is like baking a perfect cake: you need the right ingredients (skilled team members), follow a tested recipe (established processes), keep an eye on the oven (continuous monitoring), and taste-test along the way (feedback loops). And remember, even the best bakers occasionally burn a batch, so be prepared to learn from mistakes and whip up something even better next time.

Each member of a team should take ownership of the product's quality and provide the QA team with all the assistance they need to do their job well. It is also necessary for the QA personnel to perform shift left testing throughout implementation in order to identify problems early in the development cycle.

Having clearly defined standards is valuable, yet their effectiveness relies on team members actively adhering to them. It is crucial to emphasize that each team member bears the responsibility of adhering to these quality standards. This individual commitment is integral to ensuring that the team collectively delivers high-quality products. In essence, the success of our team as a whole depends on each team member to meet and uphold these quality standards. Remember one rotten potato spoils the whole bag!

Having a well structured automated testing suite might be essential to maintain quality in some domains, not to mention the utility that it might have got any domain. But then we end up in the same problem: how to maintain quality in a automated testing suite? For me it's about whole team understanding the necessity of following internal standards, finding a finding or adapting a design pattern that fits to your domain and the testing level and doing your best to turn the automated testing suite into an living documentation.