SEVEN PRACTICES TO IMPROVE SOFTWARE QUALITY

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.
 

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," 

Source: www.cio.com

DEMING'S FOURTEEN POINTS OF QUALITY

1) Create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service.

2) Adopt the new philosophy. We can no longer live with commonly accepted levels of delay, mistakes and defective workmanship.

3) Cease dependence on mass inspection. Instead, require statistical evidence that quality is built in.
 

4) End the practice of awarding business on the basis of  price. 

5) Find problems. It is management’s job to work continually on the system. 

6) Institute modern methods of training on the job.

7) Institute modern methods of supervision of production workers. The responsibility of foremen must be changed from numbers to  quality.
 

8) Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
 

9) Break down barriers between departments.

10) Eliminate numerical goals, posters and slogans for the workforce asking for new levels of productivity without providing methods.
 

11) Eliminate work standards that prescribe numerical quotas.
 

12) Remove barriers that stand between the hourly worker and their right to pride of workmanship.

13) Institute a vigorous program of education and retraining.
 

14) Create a structure in top management that will push on the above points every day

Source: pp-s.com

GARVIN'S EIGHT DIMENSIONS OF QUALITY

Quality characteristics can be analyzed with the help of eight dimensions of product quality management. David Garvin has defined the concept in the form of Eight Dimensions of Quality. These are summarized here:

1. Performance: Performance refers to a product's primary operating characteristics. This dimension of quality involves measurable attributes; brands can usually be ranked objectively on individual aspects of performance.
2. Features: Features are additional characteristics that enhance the appeal of the product or service to the user.
3. Reliability: Reliability is the likelihood that a product will not fail within a specific time period. This is a key element for users who need the product to work without fail.
4. Conformance: Conformance is the precision with which the product or service meets the specified standards.
5. Durability: Durability measures the length of a product’s life. When the product can be repaired, estimating durability is more complicated. The item will be used until it is no longer economical to operate it. This happens when the repair rate and the associated costs increase significantly.
6. Serviceability: Serviceability is the speed with which the product can be put into service when it breaks down, as well as the competence and the behavior of the service person.
7. Aesthetics: Aesthetics is the subjective dimension indicating the kind of response a user has to a product. It represents the individual’s personal preference.
8. Perceived Quality: Perceived Quality is the quality attributed to a good or service based on indirect measures.

Source: Wikipedia

WHAT MAKES A GOOD TEST ENGINEER?

Characteristics of a good Test Engineer:

• A ‘test to break’ attitude,
• An ability to take the point of view of the customer,
• A strong desire for quality, and an attention to detail.
• Tact and diplomacy are useful in maintaining a cooperative relationship with developers,
• An ability to communicate with both technical (developers) and non-technical (customers, management) people is useful.
• Previous software development experience can be helpful as it provides a deeper understanding of the software development process, gives the tester an appreciation for the developers’ point of view, and reduce the learning curve in automated test tool programming.
• Judgment skills are needed to assess high-risk areas of an application on which to focus testing efforts when time is limited.

Important Skills Required:

1. Communication Skill
Customer communication as well as team communication most important for this job. Written communication as well!

2. Technical skill

• Knowledge of Project life cycle,
• Knowledge of Testing concepts,
• Knowledge of testing types,
• Programming languages familiarity,
• Knowledge of Database concepts,
• Test plan idea,
• Ability to analyze requirements,
• Documentation skill,
• Knowledge of Testing tools

3. Leadership Skill

4. Analytical and judging skill

Don’t worry if you don’t have some of the skills mentioned above. You can always learn the things if you have interest. Non-IT personas can also grow fast by gaining necessary skills.