Analysts Margo Visitacion and Mike Gualtieri, offers practical and reality-based methods teams can make progress on improving their software quality.
The analysts focus on removal of the top issues that plague application development teams.
Here are the brief notes taken directly from the Forrester report 'Seven Pragmatic Practices to Improve Software Quality':
Practice 1: Define Quality to Match Your Needs
Impact on Quality: Meet business requirements; achieve a satisfying user experience.
Benefit: Your ability to achieve quality is improved because the application development team is not charged with unrealistically perfect expectations. Rather, it is chartered with a definition of quality that fits the given time, resource, and budget constraints.
Practice 2: Broadcast Simple Quality Metrics
Impact on Quality: Reduce defects.
Benefit: Highly visible metrics keep quality top of mind for the entire team and expose when efforts fall short.
Practice 3: Fine-Tune Team/Individual Goals to Include Quality
Impact on Quality: Meet business requirements; achieve a satisfying user experience; reduce defects.
Benefit: Team members perform according to their incentives, making quality improvement part of their goals reinforces desirable behavior.
Practice 4: Get the Requirements Right
Impact on Quality: Meet business requirements; achieve a satisfying user experience.
Benefit: Less rework means less retesting and fewer cycles, which greatly reduces the overall effort.
Practice 5: Test Smarter to Test Less
Impact on Quality: Reduce defects.
Benefit: A focus on testing the most crucial and at risk areas ensures that they receive the lion's share of test resources and that any bugs that slip through are likely to be confined to the least-important features.
Impact on Quality: Meet business requirements; achieve a satisfying user experience.
Benefit: Your ability to achieve quality is improved because the application development team is not charged with unrealistically perfect expectations. Rather, it is chartered with a definition of quality that fits the given time, resource, and budget constraints.
Practice 2: Broadcast Simple Quality Metrics
Impact on Quality: Reduce defects.
Benefit: Highly visible metrics keep quality top of mind for the entire team and expose when efforts fall short.
Practice 3: Fine-Tune Team/Individual Goals to Include Quality
Impact on Quality: Meet business requirements; achieve a satisfying user experience; reduce defects.
Benefit: Team members perform according to their incentives, making quality improvement part of their goals reinforces desirable behavior.
Practice 4: Get the Requirements Right
Impact on Quality: Meet business requirements; achieve a satisfying user experience.
Benefit: Less rework means less retesting and fewer cycles, which greatly reduces the overall effort.
Practice 5: Test Smarter to Test Less
Impact on Quality: Reduce defects.
Benefit: A focus on testing the most crucial and at risk areas ensures that they receive the lion's share of test resources and that any bugs that slip through are likely to be confined to the least-important features.
Practice 6: Design Applications to Lessen Bug Risk
Impact on Quality: Reduce defects.
Benefit: Simpler, cleaner designs result in code that is simpler, cleaner, and easier to test and rework—which means that the code will have fewer bugs and that those bugs will be easier to diagnose and repair.
Practice 7: Optimize the Use of Testing Tools
Impact on Quality: Reduce defects.
Benefit: Automation frees resources from mundane testing to focus on the highest-priority tests and increases test cycles' repeatability.
Visitacion and Gualtieri conclude that software quality is a team sport, and everyone needs to play:
"Quality must move beyond the purview of just QA professionals to become an integrated part of the entire software development life cycle to reduce schedule-killing rework, improve user satisfaction, and reduce the risk of untested nonfunctional requirements such as security and performance,"
Impact on Quality: Reduce defects.
Benefit: Simpler, cleaner designs result in code that is simpler, cleaner, and easier to test and rework—which means that the code will have fewer bugs and that those bugs will be easier to diagnose and repair.
Practice 7: Optimize the Use of Testing Tools
Impact on Quality: Reduce defects.
Benefit: Automation frees resources from mundane testing to focus on the highest-priority tests and increases test cycles' repeatability.
Visitacion and Gualtieri conclude that software quality is a team sport, and everyone needs to play:
"Quality must move beyond the purview of just QA professionals to become an integrated part of the entire software development life cycle to reduce schedule-killing rework, improve user satisfaction, and reduce the risk of untested nonfunctional requirements such as security and performance,"
Source: www.cio.com
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