Or maybe I should say "It's about time!"
From today's ACM Technews: a summary of a fascinating and very encouraging eWeek article. A few of the key issues are in the summary, but do read the full article. The opening sentence says it all: " Quality, not time, has become the critical unit of measure in software development."
Maybe, just maybe, we'll start looking at quality from the perspective of the users and the work. This would warm my heart.
"Quality Is Now Development Job One"
eWeek (12/12/05) Vol. 22, No. 49, P. D1; Coffee, Peter Embedding quality assurance (QA) deeply into the software development life cycle makes sound business sense, as it would help reduce the cost of correcting defects and satisfy regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley. A roundtable discussion convened by eWeek Labs focused on the breadth and nature of QA, which is expanding as organizations depend on purchased software and network-based services as elements for line-of-business applications. Identify Software's Lori Wizdo argued that it is wiser for customers to define quality in terms of user experience instead of what developers produce.
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Segue Software's Ian MacLeod expressed his wish for extensive industry adoption of tool integration, noting that "Quality is all the elements of the ecosystem--requirements, development and test management, defect management, monitoring, and diagnostics across the deployment line and into operations."
[ ... ]
Panelists concurred that as developers become more productive thanks to quality improvement tools, enterprise managers should apply the increased efficiency toward better understanding and fulfilling user requirements.
And another quote from the article that highlights a Praxis101 theme: useful requirements documentation.
Microsoft's Guckenheimer agreed that key aspects of quality require user input and developer commitment to understand and improve: "Typically, requirements don't cover things like performance and user experience that well—[they're] not something for which a requirements document is necessarily the right solution."
This is good; it's all good!
Technorati Tags: programming, quality, requirements, Software_Engineering