Spotlight on Software Quality Improvement: Three Strategies for Success!

According to Hewson, effort savings can be huge, considering the cost of reworking code with bugs inside. “If you wait until you build the system and have tested it, the effort to fix the bugs can be magnified by anywhere from 10 to 100 times,” Hewson says. “This occurs because the required error may spawn into multiple design errors that may spawn into multiple coding errors. These quality assurance activities are a really important part of the V-Model approach.”

The V-Model can work well for all industries, with just simple modifications to the application. If an organization is building an IT system, unit testing and integration testing must be done anyway. If this approach is used by a product company, such as IBM or Microsoft, organizations don’t have users perform the user-level testing. Instead, specialized testers will conduct general function testing, and there may be focus groups or beta tests carried out with users for formalized user testing. In a third segment, such as outsourced development companies, the organization may not want to go on to user testing unless the project is complete. The approach may be to split it into two steps—performing functional testing themselves and then presenting it to the client for final acceptance.

“The trick with this methodology is to understand how to apply the testing activities on the right-hand side given the business environment you’re in,” Hewson notes. “The V-Model gives you guidance on how to find which of these practices back which of the planning artifacts coming out of early phases in your development process.”

ISO9000 Standards

Another option for companies considering software quality process improvement is ISO9000, a family of standards for quality management that applies to IT and software development. Essentially, this standard focuses on ensuring that the organization is monitoring process effectiveness, keeping adequate records, and regularly reviewing and facilitating continual improvement of product/process quality. “ISO9000 doesn’t recommend practices or dictate process, but it says that these organizations must have management responsibility for quality procedures written down in a manual,” Hewson says. “Organizations must have a quality organization to oversee quality of work and the product.”

While ISO9000 is not actually a methodology to apply, Hewson describes it more as an accounting system to know how good or bad something is. “You won’t get quality in your organization by implementing ISO9000,” Hewson says. “But if you implement and take action on what you find, you can say, ‘Here is where we were, here is what we did, and here is where we are now.’ In that sense, it’s useful.”

ISO9000 can be especially valuable for the medical software or medical device segment, notes Hewson, because if you don’t have a good device, the implication for the patient is huge. Companies that are part of IT shops in manufacturing industries might find ISO leaching in their areas. In organizations such as Ford or Motorola, Hewson says that the ISO9000 standard was companywide, and the software development organization was expected to adhere to it.

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