Achieving Quality

Technology: Can You Automate Software Quality? "A lot of the debate has been focused on testing. Total Quality, however, would suggest that although testing is necessary, it's not sufficient. Testing focuses on inspection, not on prevention. To over-simplify, you test in hopes of demonstrating that the software has no defects (because you have a good high-quality development process), not to detect the defects that are present, but should not be there (because you don't have a good high quality development process). After several years of significant effort, the code my client was developing (and testing) still isn't of the high quality they are looking for. So we decided to go back, start from some basics, and look again at the issue of software quality."

Goes through the processes to ensure quality software: code quality (using TDD), functional quality (giving the customer what they want), non-functional quality (security, privacy, compliance, etc), deployment and production quality, and maintenance.

"This probably seems like a lot of additional work for the development organization. And it is. But the costs of defective code in the production environment (both direct, in terms of sustaining engineering, and indirect, in terms of lost revenue and reputation) was becoming significant. Management felt it had no choice but to focus on improved quality, and turn to the productivity issues later. So far, despite the added burden of all these quality–related activities (many of which already took place, but simply weren't very effective) we have not seen a slowdown in software availability. Some teams are actually moving faster than before, despite the new work they have to perform, because they spend much less time and effort on remediation and last-minute adjustments to code to fix issues that only show up as the code is transitioned to production."