Spotlight on Software Quality Improvement: Three Strategies for Success!

Trying to navigate the labyrinth of available quality improvement methodologies? Chart the right course for your organization by uncovering the bottom-line value offered by three proven strategies!

Standards in software development are essential to efforts toward improving communication between customer and contractor, reducing software costs throughout the entire life cycle, and improving overall software quality. Organizations have a number of viable choices to consider when it comes to applying software quality process improvement methodologies. Three useful options—the V-Model, ISO9000, and Six Sigma—provide different approaches to helping ensure quality in the software development process.

V-Model Approach
The V-Model, originally developed for German government defense projects in the early 1990s, is a software development process that is mapped out as a flowchart that takes the form of the letter “V.” According to Geoff Hewson, president of British Columbia-based Software Productivity Center, which helps organizations improve their software development process through technology and management services, the V-Model is the best way to look at quality in software development. In this model, planning activities—such as defining requirements, designing the system, and writing code—go down the V, while the testing activities—such as unit testing and integration testing—go up the other side. Integration testing ensures that all individual pieces of code written by developers work together as part of the whole system. Further up the V is functional testing or user-acceptance testing, which addresses whether the application does what the user wants it to do.

Hewson asserts that it’s a simple model, in concept. “The power of this practical application is that it gives a real focus on defining what kind of testing activities need to be planned for,” he says. Organizations that are not using this approach often use the “scatter-gun approach” to testing, he notes. “They’ll put the system in front of the user and think that they are doing user-acceptance testing. Yet in reality, they aren’t ready for that step yet, because they haven’t gone through the middle level. When done correctly, organizations validate what users want and don’t waste their time identifying engineering bugs,” says Hewson.

Quality assurance activities are usually in the form of reviews or inspections that document and facilitate a common understanding of requirements and designs, ensuring that they reflect what users want. Quality assurance activities make sense, Hewson asserts, especially considering the strong statistics to support it. By ensuring that early planning artifacts are as accurate as possible, Hewson says the potential savings to be realized can be between 25 and 35 percent of the effort expended on the project. The (undesirable) alternative is just writing and building code and trying to build in quality along the way.