Quality, what a beast and how to detect it

It is no secret how young the professions of control and especially quality assurance. Their importance for the IT industry has long been justified. But now, according to many applicants, this is a passing stage, which does not require special knowledge and skills. In my baggage experience with software from different areas - utilities, payment terminals, Internet service provider, retail and finally games. In all companies, in different positions, before and now I vouch for the quality of the product. The incident is that nowhere did I get a convincing answer to what kind of “quality” we strive for. Today, as QA director, I answer this question myself and want to conduct an educational program as widely as possible.

I will note the most popular quality requirements.

- “The functional must meet the requirements”
the presence of these requirements and specifications luxury, not available to all companies. And if there are requirements, they are entirely dependent on the experience of the analyst, who, moreover, may be mistaken in structuring and emphasizing them because of the human factor that has played. Not to mention how much wider and more diverse the system is in comparison with its specifications.
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- “There should be no bugs in the sale”
I do not know anything more relative than the "bug." With the rapid development of the market in six months, a blocker could be something that had not even been considered a defect before. How often a feature in development, after release, is perceived by the user as a defect, is started and fixed accordingly.

- "After the release, everything should be good / satisfy the user"
In my opinion, this requirement is more accurate than the others, the problem is only in its inaccuracy. In pursuit of user sympathy, testing becomes immense, there is never enough time to make sure of the quality and release a good enough product. We have to choose the most critical and accept the "one-way". This is pretty sad. And in these conditions there is a habit of opposing the quality of speed.

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However, I believe that "quality" is an individual concept and does not require absoluteness, concrete and measurable. And also there is no conflict between quality and speed, since individual quality is equivalent to profitability and includes speed.

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Quality - start

Edwards Deming, a doctor in physics, a statistician and the founder of quality in production, was the first to connect the quality of the product with the profits, identified and described the causal relationships. The success of his work at the factories of Toyota in the 80s, was later called the Japanese miracle.

The main idea of ​​his philosophy is customer satisfaction. Continuous changes at all stages of product development in favor of improving consumer properties. Only this guarantees competitiveness and, as a result, profitability.

Deming identifies 2 types of consumer - intermediate and final. How to calculate who they are and what they want is well formulated in his “Questions to make the team take off.” The questionnaire is applicable to any level of organizational structure:

Your organization :

1. Where is your department located in the overall organizational structure?
2. What goods and services does your organization produce and provide?
3. How is this product manufactured and service rendered, by what processes?
4. What happens if your company (division, department, group) suddenly stops producing products and providing services?

You :

1. What tasks does your department perform, what is its job?
2. What do you create or produce in the department, what exactly is the result of the work?
3. How do you do this (give a general description of what you are doing)?
4. How do you know if you got good or bad results (are there standards or criteria for good performance)?
5. How were the standards set?

Questions regarding your customers :

1. Intermediate consumer
   
   • Who is the intermediate consumer of the product or service that you produce or provide (your personal consumer)?
   • How does your consumer use what you produce?
   • What happens if you make a mistake?
   • How will consumers react to your mistakes?
   • How do you know if you have satisfied the demands of your consumers (from consumers, from the boss from reports)?
2. Intermediate and final consumer
   
   • How far (from your end user) are you, can you track the effect of what you have done?

Questions about your suppliers :

1. Who initiates your work (indication of the boss, consumer request, own initiative)?
2. Who supplies you with the materials, information, services, and other means that are needed to do your work (boss, consumer, colleague - from your team, people from other departments)?
3. What will happen to you if your suppliers do not do their job?
4. Do they have quality standards for their work?
5. How will their mistakes affect your work?
6. How do they discover if they meet your needs or requirements? Do you cooperate with them? Do you fulfill your obligations towards them?

Quality - components

Intermediate consumers in IT from each other, as a rule, need the same thing - complete, reliable, timely, understandable information for the performance of work, artifacts that do not need to be refined and modified to be used. All this is solved through processes and is designed to save time. So speed becomes part of the quality model.

The end consumer is more capricious, he is ready to pay only for the benefit received from the use of the product. The international standard ISO-9126 has classified the product according to 6 quality characteristics, each of which reflects an enlarged consumer property.



As far as functionality meets the needs, attractive, intuitive and easy to use. How stable is the performance of the system, efficient use of physical resources. In how many environments, conditions and configurations it will bring the same amount of benefits. And finally, how much effort the project team will need to plan the scaling, make changes, test and diagnose the state of the system at work.

Unspecified qualitative characteristics are divided into attributes, unambiguous and measurable. They are recommended to prioritize and focus on the most significant ones from the point of view of their personal consumer - the product user, customer and project team.

Quality - definition

1) Functionality
Of course the most important characteristic functionality. The rest enhance its effectiveness, or vice versa, as if with quality. At the same time, it is also the most difficult to formalize; “compliance with the requirements” is necessary, but not enough. The consumer wants to spend time, complete his tasks, earn income, increase savings and not think about software, much less formulate requirements for it. And also not aimed to use all possible functions of the product. The quality of the functionality is determined by the number of uninterrupted scenarios in all essential consumer contexts. This proves the vast amount of research testing literature that has emerged in recent years. It is impossible and unnecessary to ensure the performance of everything in general in all possible cases of use. It is vital to figure out the contexts of their consumers, including using software requirements. Prioritize them and vigilantly control, as any damage will entail losses.

2) Usability
The functionality is provided long before the appearance of the first testers on the project, and sometimes developers. One of the recognized experts in the preparation of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) Rand Fishkin, well-known abroad SEO specialist and marketer, recalls that the first impression cannot be made twice, and successfully promotes the concept to enter the market with EVP (Exceptional, Viable Product) , which is not It is only useful, but also appealing to the user. It is true that in terms of the sophisticated consumer, the usability characteristic ranks second. Technology usability design is constantly evolving and acquires new best practices that can and should be installed and applied in your product.

3) Portability
A product that has attracted the attention of a wide range, usually begins to be used in various conditions. Its users expect to work correctly in all of them. The internal and external statistics, and of course common sense help determine the standards of portability. With a certain degree of perseverance, in any company you can get statistics on the common conditions of an active audience. Statistics on popular trends can be found on the Internet in free access, while it is important to take into account at least the territorial cohort - the data for Russia and the world tend to differ. Common sense is needed so that the standard for portability does not include support for +100500 conditions of use. Given that the OS, devices, browsers also have standards, some of them are guaranteed to work the same or no worse than the previous version.

4) Reliability and Efficiency
The first real product success, as usual, beats him with the same problems with efficiency and reliability. Mass consumption is a dream and a challenge at the same time. Reliability, which ultimately is calculated in terms of system availability time, should strive for 100% regardless of anything. Efficiency is evaluated by the user through response time. Someone from Badoo said, “Be 20% faster than your fastest competitor,” and this is a good help for finding your personal standard of effectiveness.

5) Convenience support
Projects long-livers inevitably become complicated, overgrown with contradictions, architectural inconsistency. The specifics of staff turnover in IT does not improve the situation. The older the product, the weightier the maintenance convenience value. Documentation at all levels, from instructions for use to commenting on the code and logging the operation of functions, significantly speeds up the work with the system at all stages - in setting requirements, developing, testing and supporting. In some cases, it even protects against knowingly wrong decisions.

Here, perhaps, that's all. However, I must make a few reservations:

• each characteristic is divided into many attributes, which also have a different weight for the end user. Therefore, the formulation of quality assurance can be conducted in parallel according to the main attributes of several characteristics. I just tried to reflect the conditions affecting the priority of each of them.
  
  
• The most complex feature is functionality. The reality is that software is now inseparable from the service providing software, and this goes beyond the definition of the ISO-9126 standard. Only knowledge of the values ​​of consumers and a guideline for them will allow us to reveal exactly which functionalities are important and what exactly they include.
  
  
• The proposed characteristics priorities are not suitable for all systems; I am guided by commercial software for an external user with a relatively small cost of error and high competition. Other conditions, as a rule, soften the requirements for quality, unless the price of a mistake is equal to human life, publicity of state secrets, violation of the law. There, priorities are set differently and, I hope, quality control and quality assurance gurus work.
  
  
• product viability over time is determined by demand (measure of interest) and monetization (measure of value), which are supported by the frequency of updates. This allows us to equate the speed of the seventh quality characteristic and calculate it on the same basis as all the others, with an eye on the competitor.

As a result, it turns out that quality is an integral part of the success of a product. Requirements for it depend on the consumer, market niche, direct competitors. And also it is not opposed to production as a whole, since losses in individual quality will lead to the loss of success of the whole business.

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