Thursday, March 3, 2016

Is Quality time-consuming entity?

Lets first look at….What’s Quality? Is it just identifying defects by expert test team? That’s not quality, that’s just a way to get your product to a viable condition so you can release to world. And I agree it could be time consuming process.


How can we avoid it.


For that let us first even understand what is the meaning of “achieve quality”. Quality has always been associated with business context. The product concept need to be discussed thoroughly. Chalk out any imperfection right that step than coming into development cycle.


At the development phase, let us adopt test-driven design concept. The more effective unit tests you have, the early you will identify imperfections/flaws. This will allow you to move faster rather than waiting for test team to come into picture and find defects.


Follow an agile/lean process. That means literally eliminate anything that’s not adding any value! Get rid of unnecessary meetings, and the documentations. Adapt to user acceptance and short stories. Also avoid what we “need in future” as requirements / UI keep ever changing then why to even waste time in “need for future”


Use an On-demand Cloud Infrastructure.  Cloud is everywhere and we all know what are the benefits of using the same. Maintenance hazard is first and foremost thing we can avoid with this model. Provides flexibility, ensure data integrity, increases efficiency et al
Set up Continuous Deployment. I totally understand getting continuous deployment could be time consuming if there are hurdles faced. However get it clear that it is one time investment but benefits are for life time! This gives you a flexibility to “Build frequently and launch frequently”. Basically it equips you to get a small piece of functionality or feature done with TDD approach and get it out.


Opt-In for Parallel Executions. You can set up multiple important platforms running at the same time. Have your tests seamlessly integrated to run against these multiple combinations (you care about and/or identified from Marketing analysis et al) simultaneously.


Go for Usability Sessions. These are the best sessions. Having real users looking at your product and running through it, will help with finding UI issues/ simplification issues right away. So you can have your real users test it to identify exploratory defects. All of this can be done directly on Prod. You can always use A/B test mechanism.

Frequent Alpha-Beta Launches. You can start conducting alpha releases within your team itself or with little larger audience which constitutes product owners during development process. Alpha launch does not mean you have to have a viable and stable product. Once you are close to getting a stable product, you can opt in for beta launches. These sessions will help identify things way early to keep you moving faster!

No comments:

Post a Comment