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Chapter 6: Planning for Software Quality 139 PlanCheck Act W. Edwards Deming and the software project manager William Edwards Deming was born on October 1. Plan. You and your project team plan the pro 14, 1900, long before software development. So ject work, anticipate changes by analyzing what do his philosophies on quality have to do strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and with software project management? Plenty. threats (SWOT), and then predict the results for the different facets of your project. Deming is most known for his influence on the Projects fail at the beginning, not the end. manufacturing success Japan experienced after World War II. It was Deming s demand for 2. Do. With your plan established, you can statistical quality control and his management execute the work. The work, however, principles that allowed Japan to recover from should be completed in small steps in a the financial impact of WWII and then become controlled environment. a leader in the world economy. Deming s great 3. Study. This is the quality control portion of est influence on software development, in our the circle. You, the project team, and the opinion, is what s called the Deming Cycle, as subject matter experts must check the work the following figure demonstrates. for accuracy. 4. Act. Act to improve the process or standardize your approach in project development. When you re done, the process starts over. This approach is ideal in software project management because it s logical regardless of the software development model to which you subscribe. The goal is always the same to reduce the number of errors and improve the results. Deming s approach is iterative and enables projects to constantly improve from launch to completion. Here s how this cycle applies to software project management: out to get the network engineers, you need to stop the hate. Okay, hate may be too strong of a word, but gulfs between related areas are actually giant pitfalls that trap your quality. You ve got to establish relationships, trust, and open communication between the staff areas that interoperate. 10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce. Slogans don t improve quality; they frustrate workers. When you constantly remind people that Quality is Everyone s Job! you underscore the fact that simply talking about quality doesn t actually improve it. See Points 3 and 5.
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138 Part II: Planning Your Software Project everyone is involved in quality and works to make the total environment better, then the services and products of the organization will continue to improve. In software development, TQM means that the entire team works to make the development of the software better, the process from start to completion better, and the deliverable better as well. TQM is largely based on W. Edwards Deming s 14 Points for Quality. Here s how Deming s 14 points and TQM are specifically applicable to software development (you can find out more about W. Edwards Deming in the nearby sidebar, W. Edwards Deming and the software project manager ): 1. Create constancy of purpose for improving products and services. Every developer must agree and actively pursue quality in all of his or her software creation, testing, and development. 2. Adopt the new philosophy. This philosophy can t be a fad. The software project manager has to constantly motivate the project team to work towards quality. 3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Software development has a tradition of coding and inspection, and then reacting to errors. This model is dangerous because developers begin to lean on the testing phase to catch errors, rather than striving to incorporate quality into the development phase. As a rule, quality should be planned into software design, never inspected in. 4. End the practice of awarding business on price alone; instead, minimize total cost by working with a single supplier. The idea here is that a relationship will foster a commitment to quality between you and the supplier that s a bit more substantial than an invoice and a check. 5. Constantly strive to improve every process for planning, production, and service. Quality planning and delivery is an iterative process. 6. Institute training on the job. If your software developers don t know how to develop, they ll certainly create some lousy software. If your team doesn t know how to do something, you must train them. 7. Adopt and institute leadership. The project manager must identify how to lead and motivate the project team, or the team may lead itself, remaining stagnant. 8. Drive out fear. Are your software developers afraid of you? If so, how can they approach you with ideas for quality improvements, news on development, and flaws they ve identified within the software? Fear does nothing to improve quality. 9. Break down barriers between staff areas. If your office looks more like the set of West Side Story, with your developers (the Sharks) out to get the database administrators and the database administrators (the Jets)
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Chapter 6: Planning for Software Quality 137 Working ISO programs The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a worldwide body with 153 members that convenes in Geneva, Switzerland. The goal of the ISO is to set compatibility standards for all industries, to establish common ground, and to maintain interoperability between businesses, countries, and devices. In case you re wondering, the abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization is ISO, not IOS. This is because of all the different countries represented and the varying languages; they decided to use the abbreviation of ISO taken from the Greek isos, which means equal. There are many different ISO programs, but the most popular is ISO 9000. An ISO 9000-certified organization focuses on business-to-business dealing and striving to ensure customer satisfaction. An ISO 9000-certified organization must ensure that it Establishes and meets the customer s quality requirements Adheres to applicable regulatory requirements Achieves customer satisfaction throughout the project Takes internal measures to continually improve performance, not just once You can learn more about ISO programs and how your organization can participate by visiting their Web site: www.iso.org. Visit these Web sites for more assistance with quality management: www.managementhelp.org www.cqm.org www.asq.org Getting a Total Quality Management workout The U.S. Naval Air Systems Command originated the term Total Quality Management (TQM) as a means of describing the Japanese-style management approach to quality improvement. TQM requires that all members of an organization contribute to quality improvements in products, services, and the work culture. The idea is that if
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136 Part II: Planning Your Software Project deliver on its promises. Grade is the ranking or classification we assign to things. Consider your next flight. You expect the airplane to safely launch, fly, and land. And you expect to be reasonably comfortable during the flight. You expect the behavior of the crew and fellow passengers to be relatively considerate, even if they re a little cramped and annoyed. (You have to factor in that crying baby three rows back. It s not the baby s fault, after all.) Now consider where you re seated on the airplane. Are you in first class or coach? That s the grade! Within software developments we also have grades and quality issues. A quick, cheap software fix may be considered low grade, but it can still be a high-quality software solution because it satisfies the scope of the simple project. On the other hand, the rinky-dink approach won t work during the development of a program to track financial data through e-commerce solutions for an international company. During the planning process, one goal of stakeholder analysis is to determine the requirements for quality and grade. Working with a Quality Policy A quality policy isn t a policy that s real good. A quality policy is an organization-wide policy that dictates how your organization will plan, manage, and then control quality in all projects. This policy sets the expectations for your projects, and everyone else s, for metrics of acceptability. Quality policies fall under the big umbrella of quality assurance (QA). QA is an organization-wide program, the goal of which is to improve quality and to prevent mistakes. So who decides what quality is and what s bunk? You might guess and say the customer, which to some extent is true, but generally the quality policy is set by management. The quality policy can be written by the geniuses within your organization, or your organization may follow a quality system and the proven quality approaches within these systems. For example, your company might participate in any number of proprietary and nonproprietary organizations, thereby pledging to adhere to their quality policies. The following sections discuss a few of them.
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Chapter 6: Planning for Software Quality 135 if you give the project deliverable to the customer exactly as planned, several things may happen: Your customer may be initially happy that you ve delivered underbudget. Then they ll wonder whether you cut corners or just didn t have a clue as to the actual cost of the project. The customer may wonder why your estimate and the actual cost of the project deliverable are not in sync. The remaining budget will be returned to the customer unless your contract stipulates otherwise. Other project managers may not be happy that you ve created a massive, unused project budget when their projects have been strapped for cash. Key stakeholders may lose confidence in your future estimates and believe them to be bloated, padded, or fudged. This is, in case you haven t guessed, a bad thing. The best thing to do is to deliver an accurate estimate to begin with and avoid this scenario altogether. We discuss time estimates in Chapter 8 and cost estimates in Chapter 9. For now, know that your customer s confidence in future estimates is always measured on your ability to provide accurate estimates at the beginning of the process. If you find yourself in the scenario where you have a considerable amount of cash left in the project budget, the best thing to do is to give an accurate assessment to the customer of what you ve accomplished in the project and what s left in the kitty. Don t eat up the budget with extras, and don t beat yourself up over it. Mistakes happen, especially to beginners, and it s still more forgivable to be underbudget than it is to be overbudget. So should you also present extras to the customer when you present the project s status and the remaining budget? If the extras are value-added scope changes, we say yes. If the extras are truly gold-plated extras to earn more dollars, then we say no. Software quality is based on whether the product delivers on its promises. If the proposed changes don t make the software better, no one needs them. What you do on your current project may influence what you get to do on future projects. Honesty now pays dividends later. Examining quality versus grade Quality and grade are not the same thing. Low quality is always a problem, but low grade may not be. Quality, as you know, is the ability of software to
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134 Part II: Planning Your Software Project Going the extra mile? One clich that rings true is that it s always The customer may believe the project delivbetter to underpromise and overdeliver. We ve erable could have been completed for heard project managers tell us this is their fewer dollars without all the extras you ve approach to keep people happy. It sounds good, included. right? A customer asks for a piece of software If the customer discovers bugs in the soft- that can communicate with a database through ware, the blame may lie with the extras. a Web form. Your project team, however, creates a piece of software that can communicate The customer may not want the extras, through a Web form to the customer s database, regardless of how ingenious you believe and you add lots of query combinations for each they are. table in the database. Fantastic! Overdelivering is not meeting expectations; A valid argument can be made that you should you re not giving the customer what he or never underpromise, but promise what you can she asked for. deliver and live up to those promises. Techni- Now, having put the wet blanket on the fire of cally, in project management, quality is achieved creativity, let us say this: communicate. We by meeting the customer s expectations not can t emphasize enough how important it is to more than they expect, and certainly not less tell the customer what you can do, even if it s than they expect. more than what the customer has originally Surprising the customer with more than the pro-asked for. In software development, customers ject scope outlines can actually backfire, for the may need guidance on what each deliverable following reasons: can do, and they look to you as the expert to help them make those decisions. But notice this The customer may believe the project delivprocess is done before the project execution erable could have been completed faster begins, not during the implementation phase. without all the extras you ve included. The product scope and the project scope support one another. If the customer changes details in the product scope, your project scope will also change. If not, then your project team will be completing a project scope that won t create what the customer expects. Avoiding gold-plated software You create gold-plated software when you complete a project, and the software is ready to go to the customer, but suddenly realize that you have money to burn. If you find yourself with a hefty sum of cash remaining in the project budget, you may feel tempted to fix the situation with a lot of bling. After all,
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