ITC 493 Assessment 2: Task 1

Chapter 8, Exercise 6:
Review the concepts in this chapter related to improving the quality of software. Write a one-pate paper describing how you could apply these concepts to software development projects.

Improving the quality of software requires customer satisfaction, prefers prevention to inspection, and recognizes management responsibility for quality. Some other important issues involved in improving the quality of software are: Strong leadership, understanding the cost of quality, providing a good workplace to enhance quality, and working toward improving the organization’s overall maturity level in software development and project management can all assist in improving quality.

Answer:

Strong Leadership:
Leadership provides an environment conducive to producing quality. Management must publicly declare the company’s philosophy and commitment to quality, implement company-wide training programs in quality concepts and principles, implement measurement programs to establish and track quality levels, and actively demonstrate the importance of quality. When every employee understands and insists on producing high-quality products, then top management has done a good job of promoting the importance of quality.

The cost of Quality:
The cost of quality is the cost of conformance plus the cost of nonconformance. Conformance means delivering products the meet requirements and fitness for use. The cost of nonconformance means taking responsibility for failures or not meeting quality expectations.
The five major cost categories related to quality include:
1. Prevention cost: The cost of planning and executing a project so that it is error-free or within an acceptable error range.
2. Appraisal cost: The cost of evaluating processes and their outputs to ensure that a project is error-free or within an acceptable error range.
3. Internal failure cost: A cost incurred to correct an identified defect before the customer receives the product.
4. External failure cost: A cost that relates to all errors not detected and not corrected before delivery to the customer.
5. Measurement and test equipment costs: The capital cost of equipment used to perform prevention and appraisal activities.