Today’s market requires prompt adaptation to rapidly changing circumstances. For a software product, this means rapid delivery of the highest quality. Formerly used processes, strategies, methodologies, or tools have to be reconsidered.
The concept of quality should be considered from a holistic perspective, beyond individual projects and processes. For example, the introduction of test automation expands the capacity to implement new releases, but if the cooperation model between departments, development, and testing is not aligned, the test focus will not be sufficient to ensure quality. Therefore, it is necessary to look at the interaction between the processes and projects from an overarching perspective to raise the level of quality and use individual metrics more effectively.
How to measure quality?
The following statement: "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" (P. Drucker), seems like a truism at first glance, but it is still too seldom applied in practice. The quality criteria of the processes and methods should be connected to the entire business value chain from the moment of implementation, to always ensure that the efficiency of the individual steps is in relation to their quality.
This typically leads to the following questions:
- How can I evaluate the overall quality of all the metrics?
- Which wasteful activities can be eliminated?
- What is the success of the individual metrics? Has the quality improved?
To answer the three questions above, data from inefficient processes are needed. These can be combined into e.g. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and presented transparently. But which aspects should we look at? We worked with several software companies that decided to adapt their existing product portfolio to the resulting business goals:
- Adequate reactions to market changes.
- Customer-oriented products of the highest quality.
Based on these business goals, we have defined the following KPIs:
- KPI 1: Productivity Improvement
- KPI 2: Release Quality Index
- KPI 3: Time-to-market
Let’s see a KPI dashboard of the interaction of business objectives, KPIs, and metrics. They are visualized by a traffic light representation.
Exemplary traffic light status in QACube. The data is aggregated according to individually defined weighting in order to calculate the KPIs. However, the metrics can also be analyzed in detail via a drill-down function (trends, sliding averages, etc.).
3 methods of quality measurement
Based on the KPIs, the following operational solution strategies were developed:
- Method 1: Risk-based testing methodology.
- Method 2: Agile development.
- Method 3: Test automation.
The value of these three methods lies in focus on holistic quality and comprehensive corporate goals at the core of the system. And from a management perspective, these methods focus on efficient prioritization to avoid waste of resources.
Thus, the implementation of the three methods enables control based on the observed metrics, which ensures that both KPIs and business goals are achieved. If the KPIs are introduced without implementing the methods, success is doubtful.
In the next article, we will show the connections between methods and metrics and explain why they are crucial for successful implementation.