Quality, Not Testing

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Quality   Testing/Test Management  

When I am asked to review projects, one of the things that I ask to see is the quality plan. Almost always I am handed a test plan, and usually the project manager is very proud of the fact that they have a well-documented test plan. There seems to be a common belief that you can test quality into a project--or perhaps worse, that testing is the same as quality.

So I’d like to make this a bit of a “back to basics” article and just explore quality and testing--and perhaps help you identify some ways that you can improve the way that you manage quality on your own projects.

Quality and testing
Let’s start off by defining what we are talking about here, at least for the purposes of this article. Google will of course give you more definitions than you could ever want to deal with, but from my perspective we are dealing with the following:

Quality – the way that we ensure that standards are achieved

Testing – the measurement of performance against standards

Both of those use the word “standards”; that’s simply the level that we want to reach. Consider an exam: If the pass mark is 50 out of 100, then that’s the standard. If, on the other hand, the pass mark is 75 out of 100, then that is a higher standard. You have delivered quality if you achieve that standard--in one case, 60 out of 100 is a …

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