Quality is a perception to a large part. We can talk about "Good Enough" software quality and other aspects for reasons for higher standards. But it does all boil down to money. How much you keep and make, basic economics.
As an example, when I was at Peter Norton Computing we (the manager and I) started the QA/Test group. PNCI had been in business for 7 years prior and doing quite well without a QA/Test group (developers and others did their own testing). But they had just lost their market dominance to Central Point Software (PC Tools). PC Tools had more functionality and variety in its suite. PNCI management decided to expand product functionality of the Norton Utilities and also expand product line (added Norton Utilities for Mac, Norton Backup, and Desktop for Windows, the Norton Anti-Virus was brought in by Symantec). They recognized in order to maintain the already high level of 'quality' in the software that they needed to have a specialized group doing the testing and let development do pure dev. work. They made the investment into the Testing/QA area and supported it fully. Thus we started cranking out the software. We implemented basic processes and test metrics to evaluate the 'quality' of the software and aid in decisions for releases. We set certain 'quality' levels and once we attained them we released the product. It wasn't 'perfect', but a good bit better than the competion.
This was all done to 'improve' the 'quality' of the software and allow the company to regain its market dominance. Which it did, the products were winning PC Magazine Editor Choice awards left and right. Typically one of the aspects they won on was due to product reliability & quality. Their investment paid back in spades.
Our customers loved us for it, and bought a lot of product. But at times when the perceived quality went down we got dinged hard for it. And management made the changes to get things straightened out (didn't lay people off, but did other things to let Test and Dev. produce a solid product).
PNCI/Symantec made and kept alot of money because of this back then (89 to 92). And the 'quality' of the products was high. The market told us how much they valued functionality AND quality.
This is one case of management seeing the value of Testing/QA and how it could help them make money. All during this period of time we (Test/QA) educated management on what was involved with Testing/QA, and they were smart enough to recognize the value and invest in it.
As you can see from the WebLog title I am a bit sarcastic and cynical about this thing we call Software Testing. Over my years of experience in Software Development and Testing I have seen some very very Dilbert things happen.
Hopefully this Blog will be a good place for you to learn from some of the things I have experienced and allow you to be more effective in your efforts in Software Testing.
• May 18, 2006 - What's Quality Got to do with it
Quality is a perception to a large part. We can talk about "Good Enough" software quality and other aspects for reasons for higher standards. But it does all boil down to money. How much you keep and make, basic economics.
As an example, when I was at Peter Norton Computing we (the manager and I) started the QA/Test group. PNCI had been in business for 7 years prior and doing quite well without a QA/Test group (developers and others did their own testing). But they had just lost their market dominance to Central Point Software (PC Tools). PC Tools had more functionality and variety in its suite. PNCI management decided to expand product functionality of the Norton Utilities and also expand product line (added Norton Utilities for Mac, Norton Backup, and Desktop for Windows, the Norton Anti-Virus was brought in by Symantec). They recognized in order to maintain the already high level of 'quality' in the software that they needed to have a specialized group doing the testing and let development do pure dev. work. They made the investment into the Testing/QA area and supported it fully. Thus we started cranking out the software. We implemented basic processes and test metrics to evaluate the 'quality' of the software and aid in decisions for releases. We set certain 'quality' levels and once we attained them we released the product. It wasn't 'perfect', but a good bit better than the competion.
This was all done to 'improve' the 'quality' of the software and allow the company to regain its market dominance. Which it did, the products were winning PC Magazine Editor Choice awards left and right. Typically one of the aspects they won on was due to product reliability & quality. Their investment paid back in spades.
Our customers loved us for it, and bought a lot of product. But at times when the perceived quality went down we got dinged hard for it. And management made the changes to get things straightened out (didn't lay people off, but did other things to let Test and Dev. produce a solid product).
PNCI/Symantec made and kept alot of money because of this back then (89 to 92). And the 'quality' of the products was high. The market told us how much they valued functionality AND quality.
This is one case of management seeing the value of Testing/QA and how it could help them make money. All during this period of time we (Test/QA) educated management on what was involved with Testing/QA, and they were smart enough to recognize the value and invest in it.
Jim