Competitive clutter is real. No surprise then that businesses today are trying out every means possible to set themselves apart from the crowd. A crucial aspect of these efforts is an increasing focus on quality – of products as well as services. For the software business too, an ever increasing focus on delivering top-notch quality is becoming paramount. Capable of making or breaking a company’s reputation, the quality of services, products and interpersonal interactions is assuming exponential proportions by the day.
What is quality and how is it measured? How can a software application be termed as a quality one? What does a company do to produce a quality software application? In this blog, we will go through all the aspects of Quality as an attribute and what goes into making a product, application and / or service a quality one.
What is Quality?
As we know, a software company is a combination of multiple people, some of whom are involved in software development, delivery, and client relationship management. The intent really is to produce a ‘quality’ software application. These personnel go by the designations of Developer, Tester, QA Analyst, Solution Analyst, Business Analyst, Technology Lead, Module Lead, Project Lead / Manager, Project Director, CTO, CEO, and so on.
However, each and every person involved in producing a quality software application has his / her own point of view about what the term ‘quality’ means. Let’s take a look at what the word means to different people.
Developer: A software application that takes lesser time to executive and occupies lesser memory space, while fulfilling every requirement is called a quality application.
Tester: A software application that not only takes lesser time to executive and occupies lesser memory space, but is bug / error free is called a quality application.
Business Analyst: A quality application not only fulfills customers’ needs, but also adds value to the system resulting in greater productivity for customers
Management: Quality is not just what is put into an application. It is what a customer gets out of the application.
Customer: A quality software must provide customers with enhanced productivity and make achieving business outcomes hassle free.
How do companies produce ‘quality’ software?
- Research on competitors’ products or services in the same domains with a focus on features, system prerequisites, type of user interface (UI), end user friendliness of the UI, time of task execution, space consumption, criticality, reliable, consistency, durability, productivity and outcome generation for customers, and so on
- Choose a team with experience in the same domains
- Give business / technical suggestions for the betterment of clients’ business processes during the requirement gathering phase
- Implement the latest technologies and processes for software development. For instance, AGILE is the preferred methodology for software engineering processes these days
- Conduct regular code reviews
- Make the UI look nice and help end users perform tasks with only mouse and keyboard hits
- Make application features as dynamic as possible
- Develop and use reusability components as much as possible
- Carry out maximum number of testings with different test techniques. For instance, companies these days deploy applications in public for testing and security advice
- Appoint hackers for projects to optimize security threats to software systems
- Deliver projects in phases instead of doing so at one go
- Track delivered applications as much as possible
- Introduce auto updates and / or authorized updates
In conclusion, it needs mention that the aforementioned steps are the basic ones that companies must follow while producing a ‘quality’ software system. These may vary from company to company based on specified budgets, timeframes and other organizational aspects.