It’s the sordid little secret of many IT development organizations: with tight schedules, tighter budgets, and projects increasing both in scope and complexity, the deadline too often becomes the all-important goal. From the boardroom executives on down to the line managers in the development cubicles, little if any forethought is being given to quality. The mission is clear: Get to the market first and fast. Fix it later. Catch the bugs in testing after the coding is mostly done.
“We’re too busy for process improvement” is a frequent refrain. Occasionally, well-meaning management might resort to a slogan like “Quality Is Job One.” The reality, though, is that quality becomes Job 1.1.
Not only is management lacking insight into the process, in the trenches, at the developer level, there is no clear focus on quality assurance. Certainly testing may be carried out, usually at the end of the development work, but testing does nothing to ensure quality of the software product.
I agree with you. IT organizations give little thought to quality in a rush to market it faster and fix it later. This phenomenon has resulted in high maintenance costs and in a few cases took the stake holders back to the drawing boards. As of late, the QA paradigm has shifted greatly and is gaining traction to improve user experience. While organizations are embracing the new technologies like Web 2.0, SOA, cloud computing etc.., there have been increasing concerns to verify and validate the application architecture, design/coding standards in terms of functionality, performance, User experience, maintainability, scalability, security, availability etc. Organizations are looking forward to implement the QA Life Cycle in parallel to the SDLC. And hence QA will no longer be seen as an after thought rather it will gain place as a iterative process/feature in every phase of the SDLC.
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Michael WoodProject Manager / Business Analyst / Business Process Improvement Guru| Independent ContractorGig Harbor, Wa, United States
All true, but sadly a self fulfilling prophecy. As a CIO of 9 years for one organization I can promise you that its the CIO not the management that creates the vacuum of quality. There is always time for BPI, the stakeholders and management crave it. Its just that CIOs have no idea how to sell it.
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