Quality: Gov.uk Guide

What is meant by this word, how to assess quality and how to maintain it.

Quality must come first when working on a project if you want people to use your services and appreciate them. Each member of your team is responsible for the quality - the work of the people who create the service determines its quality. Every employee who works on your project should contribute to maximizing the quality and solving problems.

Quality Definition

Different people in the team will understand quality in different ways. In general, quality is the level of customer service, from the beginning of the transaction to its completion, which includes:
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• Providing access for (the widest possible range of users) to the optimal set of devices.
• Sufficient ease of use of a device
• Ability to quickly provide technical and informational support to users
• Safety and convenience of storage and use of data
• Efficiency and security of basic software and IT infrastructure.
• Full performance code.
• High speed of the service when interacting with a large number of users at the same time (requires load testing).
• Presence of all conditions for the rapid increase of the service capabilities when it is necessary to handle a larger volume of traffic.
• The ability of the team to quickly add or edit the functionality of the service in accordance with changes in requirements or settings.

A couple of words about "technical duty"

“Technical debt” is a popular term in software development, and it has many definitions. In general, “technical debt” is usually referred to as compromise decisions taken to complete the development of a software product when it is not possible to do this properly. This means that some refinement is required, although the creation of the program as a whole is complete.

It is impossible to develop a program without accumulating "technical debt", so the people of your team should share with each other the experience of correct processing. A large amount of "technical debt" will slow down further work on the project. You need to know its volume in order to organize your work in such a way as to reduce it and gradually reduce it in the future.

All are responsible for quality

Quality of service plays a role not only when testing a software product. Also, the quality is not responsible for some small group of employees. The quality of any system is ensured by the people who create it.
Your employees should be able to notice any quality problems with your system. Each of them should contribute to quality improvement and problem solving.

You will not be able to understand how successful your software product is, and whether it meets your requirements without testing - both under normal and non-standard working conditions. You should read Dylan Robert's “ Learning From First Responders ” book to learn how software testing and testing work of a team under high loads (in this case, during the final stage of the 2012 presidential election) are conducted.

All team members are responsible for the quality of any digital services, but the ultimate responsibility lies with the service manager. It is important that he directly interacts with the rest of the team. Otherwise, there is a risk that your employees will not understand what measures they need to take to ensure quality. Your employees need to consider quality issues when creating user stories and use time and resources to:

• testing the program being created;
• simplify the program and regularly check its availability to users;
• analyzing error scenarios and developing a plan of necessary actions.

Attracting specialists and using special tools is very useful for ensuring the effectiveness of testing and is appropriate when testing protection against unauthorized access - engaging employees who are not part of the development team for this task allows you to test the effectiveness of solutions and identify weaknesses in the system, providing a useful look at problems from

And hiring specialists for quality assurance - they will be able to properly coordinate all the activities related to quality, organize a system of trainings and provide the resources needed to create high-quality service, by:

• taking on specific responsibilities and teamwork, and thus improving the quality of everything they do, rather than simply assessing project progress at checkpoints.
• taking on responsibilities only for a short time and giving your employees the opportunity to manage quality themselves as part of a standard development and service improvement process.

We discussed this material with a number of FRIA Accelerator startups:

Questions: How do you work with technical debt? Do you use this concept in the work on your project? If so, how do you calculate its volume? Are there any special rules for the team to eliminate it?






Our publications based on Gov.uk materials:

• Working with User stories: Gov.uk Guide
• Gov.uk: basic aspects of the agile methodology
• User-Designed Product Design
• Retrospective management or a look into the past