Mission Possible: Ensuring the Quality of Your Software Product
What is quality? It may come as a surprise that most companies don’t have the time and resources to think about their definition of quality. At least not in detail.
At LD Studios, we value the quality of the software products our development team creates for our clients. We work with clients of any size. From early-stage startups, NGOs and universities, to Fortune 500 enterprises. According to our experience, achieving high quality comes as a result of two important factors.
First, provide quality early – at the development phase.
Second, execute well-planned and well-documented iterative testing.
James Whittaker, an author of books in the “How to Break Software” series, is currently a Distinguished Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. Before that, he worked as an Engineering Director at Google. He wrote a series of posts explaining Google’s understanding of quality and testing.
It appears that Google’s approach is different than most organizations. Google doesn’t have a large testing department but assigns the process to the developers.
The truth is that all software has bugs. Development teams work hard to avoid and fix them. At LD Studios we use several practical approaches, originally defined in a Forrester report. They can help you improve the quality of the software products you deliver to your clients.
Practical Approach #1: Define Quality and Metrics
Create clear definitions and realistic metrics. These serve as a baseline for your developers while working on a software product. If you know how to measure quality, you know how to measure success. You can involve your business stakeholders and the entire development team in this process.
Practical Approach #2: Announce Realistic Quality Metrics
The impact on quality when you announce realistic quality metrics is a reduction of defects. Metrics, which are highly visible for the entire team, help them always keep quality in mind. It’s also an easy and fast method to detect failures. The entire development team has a major role in applying this approach.
Practical Approach #3: Motivate Your Team
Motivating your team members is of vital importance to the project’s success. It impacts performance. When quality improvement is a constant part of their goals, the output will be high quality. Management can apply this approach and achieve fulfilled business requirements and a reduction in defects.
Practical Approach #4: Understand the Requirements
Starting the development process with the correct requirements results in less rework. As a whole, it reduces the necessity of continuous testing and the overall effort of the team. This is an approach whose success depends on everyone - managers, business analysts, and software architects.
Practical Approach #5: Test Smarter and Get Better Results
Quality assurance personnel and managers should pay special attention to the most important and risky areas of testing. The benefit is a reduction in defects that saves time and ensures a high-quality product.
Practical Approach #6: Create a Simple and Clean Design
Try having software architects and developers focus on simpler and cleaner designs. The resulting code is also simple and clean. Such code is much easier to test and, whenever necessary, to rework. As a result, you’ll have code with fewer bugs. This means less effort and time to diagnose and repair problems.
Practical Approach #7: Use Efficient Testing Tools
Implementing automation in the quality assurance process and testing frees up resources. You can engage these resources to work on tests that are of highest priority.
Here’s a suggestion - put yourself in the shoes of a client who will use your product regularly. Ask yourself - what can be done to improve the user’s experience? Before making changes or adding new features, evaluate the options carefully. Make sure that changes really add value to your product. Consider creating detailed and useful documentation that can save time for you and your client.
Hopefully, these practical approaches will help you deliver quality software products to your customers. That benefits all software development companies, as it helps maintain a positive reputation for our industry.
We are LD Studios, an Atlanta based software consulting business. We would love to hear from you! Please contact us for your free consultation.