Spotlight on Software Quality Improvement: Three Strategies for Success!

Six Sigma

Six Sigma offers another methodology for process improvement. This set of practices can be applied to process and product quality—with the goal of eliminating defects, which can be defined as anything causing customer dissatisfaction.

“The essence of Six Sigma is that you define specific goals and specific measures, which provides guidance as to what to do,” Hewson says. “I find it a particularly useful way to justify and drive improvements in an organization.”

Six Sigma teams follow the DMAIC model:

• Define goals that are consistent with enterprise strategy and customer demands.
• Measure key aspects and collect relevant data.
• Analyze data.
• Implement improvements or optimization based on data analysis.
• Control to ensure that any deviations from the target are correct before they result in defects, set up pilots to establish process capability, move on to production, set up control mechanisms, and continuously monitor the process.

Although Six Sigma is not an international standard, thousands of companies around the world have realized the benefits of the methodology, which relates to improving processes and saving money in the process. The methodology follows a hierarchy of process improvement experts who execute the process: Green Belts, Black Belts, and Master Belts.

Regarding software development projects, the Six Sigma approach is most helpful in the concept and requirements-gathering phases. This approach helps to ensure that the main project focus remains on the deliverables and not the technology.

Challenges of Improvement Methodologies

The actual technical selection of a process improvement methodology is brainwork and not too difficult of a task, says Hewson. The challenge areas, in his experience, are related to people and motivation. The key question to consider is: Do you really want to get better?

According to Hewson, it’s often a management issue. Do they have enough challenges in the organization that they are prepared to do what is necessary in order to improve? Management also must have a method for encouraging and enforcing the appropriate behaviors and practices. Otherwise, the organization will put an approach in place, but it will remain business as usual in the trenches.

There are other people-related issues to consider as well. In order to select and implement a methodology successfully, organizations must have the people to embrace it. If an organization has firm commitment from management and the employee teams, it can define processes, select practices for use, train, and implement solutions, bringing in coaches if needed to help with the implementation; however, without people who are committed to following it, it will not be successful. “Unfortunately, you’ll just spend a lot of money and do a lot of work,” Hewson concludes. Regardless of which methodology an organization ultimately chooses to implement, the key is to recognize how embracing standards in software development can be key to improving communication between customer and contractor, reducing software costs throughout the entire life cycle, and improving overall software quality.

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