Why quality matters?
Developing products in any sector is very costly and tedious process, so you definitely want to do it right and get the best result for the given budget and time. Besides implementing features that bring great value for the end user, you have to make sure that those features are reliable and user friendly implemented.
Some development managers and especially the majority of software developers are not aware of the importance of quality. So let us shed some light to the reasons why this mindset must be changed.
Software is a tool
Software is a tool that should help users do their jobs better. Every tool must bring some features which entail clear advantages and value to the end user, but those features also must be stable and reliable, so that no frustration comes up during the usage of the tool.
Building a brand
Reliability of a software tool is essential when building user acceptance and satisfaction. Satisfied users build their trust and loyalty to the product and thereby build up the company’s brand.
Developers are only humans
No matter how good your developers in terms of technology knowledge and experience are, they are still humans which tend to make mistakes. Even in cases where the implementation of a features is flawless, there can be a simple misunderstanding of requirements provided by the product owner. To avoid those misunderstandings, a quality assurance engineer must write his own tests and thereby demonstrate his way of understanding the requirements. If some tests are failing, then not always a faulty implementation is the cause. Perhaps simply a different interpretation of requirements led to different implementation of tests and a feature.
Failing fast saves resources
No matter why there is a bug in a software, you want to find it as early as possible in the development process. When end users report bugs you actually already lost the game because your reputation and hard earned trust is damaged. Besides preventing the loss of reputation you also want to maximally reduce development costs. Reducing the costs of fixing defects has a tremendous potential. According to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) the cost of fixing software bugs increases exponentially in the course of time:
Therefore by finding defects as early as possible in the development lifecycle, one can significantly reduce the costs of the whole product development.
Conclusion
In times of huge competition the quality became extremely important factor as it has a decisive impact on success of your product and thereby company. We at Laniteo are well aware of this fact and have identified quality as one of our four core values. Therefore we advocate our clients to invest enough resources in quality assurance to get the best possible product from the given budget and time frame. The best practice is to implement quality assurance in every step of the production process - starting from requirements analysis and going till the deployment and productive operation. For companies who seek independent and objective quality assurance we offer Software Testing as a dedicated service.
If you have any further questions, or simply need help by the analysis to make your decision, please contact us. We offer you a free consulting.
