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The concepts and goals of quality management in software development
The demand for quality products makes organizations build a strong quality management system to achieve high-quality processes and lower operational risks. In this article, we will find out what lies behind the concept of quality management, and why it is important for software development.
What is quality management?
Quality management is, very broadly, a set of actions aimed at doing things right. It includes planning, defining project standards, identifying the staff responsible, and determining product quality indicators.
Quality management implies the use of specialized software which can display and document information, provide process visualization, control changes, report, etc.
Below are the key quality management components:
- Quality planning. The process of determining which standards are important to the project and figuring out how to meet them.
- Quality assurance (QA). A set of activities that ensure the implementation of the processes necessary to meet quality requirements.
- Quality improvement. Deliberate changes made to a process in order to increase the reliability.
- Quality control. The process of ensuring that the product’s quality is maintained.
Total Quality Management
Differences between Quality Control, QA, and TQM
Along with quality management, there exists the concept of Total Quality Management (TQM). TQM helps improve both the quality of products and the quality of organization management in the company. In other words, this approach focuses on implementing customer requirements, improving the company’s business performance, and increasing the level of satisfaction and employee interest. TQM principles are reflected in a number of agile development methodologies, as well as ISO quality management standards.
Quality assurance and quality control in software development
Quality assurance and quality control are integral parts of any software development process. Let’s consider them in more detail.
QA in software development combines such activities as design, programming, release, deployment and implementation, maintenance and support. QA aims at:
- Ensuring that delivery is free of defects and matches non-functional requirements.
- Checking if the product is compliant with standards and regulations (formal, industry, local and international laws, etc.).
- Working with requirements.
- Planning tests.
- Selecting tools for testing, and more.
Quality control for software development
Quality control is an essential part of quality assurance. It is one of the main quality management processes which provides an objective reflection of the product quality at different stages of the development. Quality control shows whether the solution is of good quality or needs improvements. It also verifies whether the system is compliant with the requirements, and the degree of readiness of the release of the finished product. If quality management can be described as the process of planning actions aimed at meeting quality requirements, then quality control is the process of researching, measuring, and evaluating the quality level of the end result.To put it simply, quality control together with QA are aimed at “doing the right things” in order to get the expected results.
Quality control consists of comparing the end product with the quality indicators in the documentation created at the previous stages.
Quality control methods and techniques include:
- verification
- validation
- testing
- code inspection
- software architecture analysis
- prototyping
- profiling.
Conclusion
Quality management, quality assurance, and quality control should always go hand in hand with the development process. Ensuring that quality criteria are met across the full life cycle of software development leads to improved processes, increased employee commitment, and – last but not least – to customer satisfaction.
If you are looking for a prominent quality assurance company, feel free to get in touch with EffectiveSoft.
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