Software quality challenges and practice recommendations

Brief introduction

Software development and engineering are considered very young occupations, but they are widely used and are growing at a faster rate than ever before. In many countries, the software industry is now often seen as one of the main pillars of economic growth. Software companies often face many difficult challenges in delivering high-quality software, and they are doing everything they can to satisfy their customers.

Software quality is indispensable

As software becomes an integral part of everyday life, the need for software has grown markedly. Correspondingly, high software quality is now considered "necessary" rather than "should have". It is critical that the quality assurance team be involved in project planning and execution from the outset. However, some companies still believe that software quality is just a task that testers perform at the end of the development lifecycle.

It is worth noting that the software market is full of choices, there are many free, open source software exists. In addition, customers and end users increasingly value the quality of the software they buy. Applications or enterprise systems with poor performance or a low quality user experience will be eliminated, and other products can easily take their place. It has become the mission of software companies to focus on the quality of their products.

Software quality must be considered throughout

The problem with the way that software QA is condensed into the testing phase of all development tasks is that it brings significant costs to the team and puts the entire project at high risk. During the testing phase, developers make every effort to ensure that their code has very few flaws. The testers then try to uncover every possible flaw in the software, and managers and customers want them to have the right software to release to the market.

The question is: Why do many software companies insist that the development team meet stringent deadlines and perform as many functions as possible without caring about the poor quality of the code, ignoring the large number of flaws in the injected code, committing architectural errors, and ignoring documents?

Hasty development may save the team a moment of time, but if there are some major development issues that are not considered from the outset, it may eventually lead to more time to invest. The result is a huge amount of team resources wasted to fix and redesign the code rather than devote it to more useful things. The software team has a clear view of the whole story, but it is hard for the software team to put QA aside and just finish the code in the face of nagging customers, strict sales teams, and developers who feel they are writing software that is flawed.

Software engineering standards and their use

It is worth mentioning that the company does not need to adhere to a certain software development standards, nor need to have a strict process. A typical software development lifecycle (SLDC) has various standards, such as IEEE, ISO-12207, or CMMI. The goal of these standards is to ensure that the final product meets market demand and achieves end-user satisfaction.

In fact, many software applications, mobile applications, and even complete enterprise systems are sold to different customers every day, and these applications may not be developed using any standard. However, people are still buying them. Ignoring standards is not directly related to poor software quality and less demand for final products (as long as the software is not vital to life, such as medical software in the United States that requires FDA approval and compliance with certain standards). The problem is not adherence to standards. The real problem is the importance of ignoring or weakening software quality.

This article does not mean to comply with the SDLC standard, nor to have an excellent development and testing process. First, it is important to recognize that quality is an important part of any software. The company does not necessarily need a highly professional QA team and practice, but must at least accept the culture itself and have relevant practices.

Software quality practice through the lifecycle of software development

The practice provided in this section will have a positive impact on software quality and will not create too much burden or trouble for the development team. They are worth considering in the development and testing practice.

Requirements Audit

Don't you think it's really scary to waste resources to deliver the wrong functionality? Review software requirements before starting each new development phase to minimize defects and meet customer needs. Review requirements prior to implementation, which helps to consider potential changes and overcome misunderstandings that may occur throughout the life of the project. The team must review all the business area details that should be implemented with the customer. Requirements audits can also be done using prototypes and domain models. When the development team completes this small task before the actual implementation, their project or development iterations get off to a good start. By ensuring that all stakeholders reach a consensus prior to implementation, and that each team member agrees, customers and managers can be confident that developers will deliver the right results at the end of the development cycle.

Code audits and Walkthroughs

It sounds like simple, but code auditing is one of the most effective practices in software development. It has a direct impact on reducing the number of defects (found in the window before the bug goes into the software) and enhancing the quality of the code and software design. This eliminates the need to perform significant code refactoring and cleanup in future releases.

Depending on the project requirements and implementation details, the team may identify with simple coding and design principles. Team members should work together to comply with these principles, and as long as a new feature is developed, one or more team members (other than the author) should audit the new code and search for all coding or design errors.

This approach can help teams in many ways, including improving code quality and design, minimizing defects, and preventing them. In addition, it enables the entire team to gain insight into each other's work, ease handover, and improve the team's understanding of the different software components and functions. Team collaboration verifies and validates code quality and design implementation methods. They get direct feedback from their co-workers. This is a way to kill both: code quality increases, and team awareness and project responsibilities increase.