The quality process - traditional vs. new

Traditional quality assurance principles are not a good fit for today's software projects. Further, the traditional processes by which we ensure quality in software systems are cumbersome and inflexible. Even more important, the traditional tools used by quality assurance are not able to keep up with the pace of software development today. Testers constrained to follow these outmoded practices using these cumbersome tools are doomed to failure.

The quality process must be reinvented to fit the real needs of the development process. The process by which we ensure quality in a product must be improved. A company needs to write its own quality goals and create a process for ensuring that they are met. The process needs to be flexible, and it needs to take advantage of the tools that exist today.

Several new technologies exist that can be used to support quality assurance principles, such as collaboration, which allows all involved parties to contribute and communicate as the design and implementation evolve. These technologies can also help make quality assurance faster and more efficient by replacing traditional paper documentation, distribution, and review processes with instantly available single-source electronic documents, and by supplementing written descriptions with drawings.

Replacing tradition requires a culture change. And, people must change their way of working to include new tools. Changing a culture is difficult. Historically, successful cultures simply absorb new invading cultures, adopt the new ideas that work, and get on with life. Cultures that resist the invasion must spend resources to do so, and so become distracted from the main business at hand.

Software quality is a combination of reliability, timeliness to market, price/cost, and the feature richness. The test effort must exist in balance with these other factors. Testers need tools-that is, methods and metrics that can keep up with development-and testers need the knowledge to use those tools.

Traditionally, testing has been a tool to measure the quality of the product. Today, testing needs to be able to do more than just measure; it needs to be able to add to the value of the product.