Quality Management of Software in the Modern Enterprise- Challenges and Solutions

• Enterprise software is in­creasingly be­ing developed by an outsourc­ing partner or bought from the market and cus­tomized or integrat­ed with other systems. Agile development practices are common­place these days, which means self-managing teams, blurring of boundaries between project roles, and a highly iterative development process that multiplies the chances of errors. It’s hard to manage the quality of software that is put together under environmental factors that are not with­in your direct control.

• There is constant pressure to keep costs low while accelerating time to market. This raises the question of how much money and time you can afford to spend on assuring quality, especially when you are not quite sure how effectively that spend is being utilized and what you are going to get in the end from it.

• A holistic approach to software quality management is missing. You rely too much on testing, which happens after defects have already been introduced into the product, in an attempt to “control” quality by finding and removing the offensive “bugs” from your software rather than trying to prevent them in the first place.

• Metrics related to quality are poorly understood or wrongly used. To take decisions on how much to spend on quality and whether or not to proceed with the deployment of an application to production, you need quantitative information you can rely on and the skills to analyze and generate meaningful insights from that information. Many companies lack in both.

• Effective use of automation for software quality management is not yet a reality. Is automation all that important? Oh yes, it is! When there’s a lot you have to do to assure the quality of highly complex software that is undergoing repeated cycles of changes within shrinking schedules, you just cannot get to all of it through time-consuming, error-prone manual processes. Need another reason? Automation of IT processes, including those for software development and deployment, has been gathering momentum in recent times, and as the speed and efficiency of these processes improve, you need similar performance from your quality management processes as well, which can be achieved only through automation.

So what do you do about these challenges? A few recommendations for the CIO for starters:

• Make it clear, in no uncertain terms, that quality is top priority. Publish a quality policy and quality goals for your organization.

• Make quality everybody’s business, not just that of your QA department. This may need a big change in mindset. Enablement, encouragement and enforcement may be needed in various measures!

• Be smart about the use of quality metrics so you don’t have to fly blind. Hold your managers accountable for metrics based decision-making.

• Invest in automation. I have explained above why it is important. It will fetch you returns over and over again that more than make up for the upfront investment (provided you do it right).

The good news is that things are changing for software quality management. Not only is there an increasing acknowledgement of its importance by top executives and a corresponding increase in spend, there are also innovative solutions appearing in the market that leverage advancements in technology to address many of the challenges discussed above. These include tools for integrated test management, code reviews, cloud based testing , Continuous Integration, Service Virtualization, test lab management and the like. A capable software quality management system will have to bring together a number of these tools and integrate them effectively into your software development process infrastructure. You can’t buy it off the shelf; you will have to build it yourself or work with a consultant who can help you with it.