Ensuring Software Quality | A pragmatic approach in current dynamics

Ensuring software quality is a challenging task in the current dynamics with aggressive timelines, changing business requirements, increasing enterprise-level constraints and demanding user experience expectations.

These challenges make the development team's task more demanding and often there is a dilemma on how to balance between software cost (more time for ensuring quality) vs. software quality.

In this blog, I am sharing my thoughts based on my experience & research on this subject area.

How do we define Software Quality?

"the degree to which a set of static attributes of a software product satisfy stated and implied needs for the software product to be used under specified conditions" - (ISO 25010)

As we have both functional (critical to business stakeholders) & non-functional (critical to technical stakeholders) aspects when assessing quality of software system, it can be expressed as:

In this blog, focus is on improving the structural quality of software, which eventually impacts functional quality aspects as well.

How do we define Structural Quality?

"the degree to which non-functional attributes of a software product such as maintainability, modularity, robustness, etc. satisfy stated & implied needs for the software product"

Some structural quality attributes such as performance & security can be measured using static/dynamic code-metrics tool, whereas few attributes like modularity & maintainability might require manual review process.

What are the focus areas to ensure Software Quality?

Often, we are reactive as opposed to being proactive in addressing quality. Quality starts early & hence process needs to be established across all phases of SDLC:

• Requirements
• Architecture
• Design 
• UI Development (considering increasing focus on user experience, this is a must to consider it as a SDLC phase)
• Development 
• Testing
• Maintenance

Each SDLC phase needs to have clearly defined quality process with transparent entry/exit criteria based on ETVX (Entry/Task/Verification/Exit) model & supported by following:

• Templates – Aims to make sure agreed skeleton for artifacts
• Standards & Guidelines – Aims to make sure actions are predictable, detailed & repeatable
• Checklist – Aims to make sure there is consistency in completeness
• Tools – Aims to support & bring efficiency in process and also bring consistency in usage across

What are the metrics & tools to measure Software Quality?

How do we provide governance to keep check on Software Quality?

• Governance needs to be very simple & effective. A very complicated structure & complicated process does not go well with team and often people tend to deviate from it.
• A periodic checkpoint with team as part of governance model is must and needs to be informal to assess actual health of the software system.
• Finally, a simplistic viewpoint (either using any tool) or even manual dashboard can  bring transparency & visibility to the system (clearly defined KPIs to track quality parameters)

Do we have any future vision (as-is & to-be map)?

• Moving from Subjective Development Quality towards Measurable Development Quality is very important. If we don't know how to measure quality, then it can't be measured against any internal/external benchmark.
• Quality Governance Model is often ignore and not well established or not followed. Having Architecture Review Board, Design Review Board & Quality Review Board (on periodic basis) is a big plus and needs to be supported by Senior Leadership.
• Automation is the key to meet aggressive timelines challenge & usually it is less prone to errors. Whether it is code generation, build generation or quality reports automation, it holds key to success.
• Having Uniform & Consistent Methods to apply during SDLC phases ensures success with certitude.
• Finally, establish benchmarks in your organization to compare quality score of each project. Without knowing where you stand, it's impossible to achieve the targeted goal.

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