Project Quality Management

 

Main objective of any software project is to deliver the product that meets or exceed the client ‘s expectation. Quality Management complements Project Management. Good Project management ensures that all the best quality tool and technique should be applied throughout the project. Many people tends to have perception that quality management is time consuming and tedious. It requires a lot of things needs to be documented, reviewed and monitored. Also, it is waste of time and increases the cost of the project. My experience says that if you don’t follow quality management for your project efficiently, you will have to deal with dire consequence of project delayed, over working on the project. Also Project  may suffers or scrapped if their quality is compromised or product does not meet customer ‘s need or expectation. I witnessed many projects where project team put a lot of extra efforts to meet the project deadline overlooking the quality of the project. It produces a negative consequence of rework, unfounded errors and attrition. So ignore Quality management at your peril.

 

Project Quality Management consists of processes which includes all the activities of performing organization that determine quality policies, objective and responsibilities so that project will satisfy the needs and requirements for which it was undertaken.

 

Project Quality Management include the following:

 

Quality Planning:

 

Identifying which standards, quality processes that can be relevant  to the project so that project will satisfy it needs.

 

Perform Quality Assurance:

Applying the planned, systematic quality activities to ensure that the project employ all processes needed to meet requirements.

 

Perform Quality Control:

Monitoring specific project results to determine whether they comply with relevant quality standard and identifying ways to eliminate the causes of unsatisfactory performance.

 

 Quality Planning: Tool and technique

 

It is always recommended that Quality planning should be discussed among the project team in the project kick off meeting. Project Management should guide the team regarding the objective and benefits of the quality management and Project team should be imparted the roadmap to achieve the objective of quality in the project with project team. Project team should be quality trained, motivated and guided enough to understand the objective of the quality as basic needs of the project, they should not take it for granted.

 

Objective of the quality for the project could be as follows:

• Deliver the product which meet or exceed the client ‘s expectation.
• Deliver the product on schedule.
• No critical bug should be found in Release product version.

Once objective of the quality for the project has been defined, next task is  to plan the roadmap to achieve objectives of the quality of the project.

 

Quality Planning should includes:

 

• Best practices learned:

It is always advisable to share the defects, preventive actions, best practices learned in the projects of similar nature. It will help the team to prevent the defects in the beginning itself.

 

• Rules, Standards and Guidelines:

 

There is a saying that Prevention is better than cure. Same logic apply here. The cost of preventing mistake is generally much less than the cost of correcting them. Rules, Standards and guideline helps us to prevent the defects in early stage of project life cycle.

For example, Coding Standards for C#, if programmer apply coding standards to his codes, you may prevent many defects which can be caused by inefficient programming like code not commented and indented, Code is not easily readable and not modular,  database connections are not closed in the end etc. So always remember, bug should be nipped in the bud as soon as possible.

 

Reviewing the code and documents reviews are best way to prevent defect in later stage of project life cycle. Reviews can be categorized into Self-Review, Peer review and Peer-to-Peer review:

 

·         Self-Review:

This is the software review process in which Programmer review his code and document and fix his defects in the excel worksheet. It is just to ensure that your code/document has complied with standards, rules and guideline as decided by project management for the project.

 

·         Peer to Peer review:

Peer to Peer review is the software review process in which your code or document reviewed against standards, guideline by your colleague who may be working on same project. He will share his finding with you and you have to fix it. You may review his code too if planned.

 

·         Peer reviews:

In Peer reviews, many of your colleagues review your code, one observe your code, one records your defects, one moderate the code. Then you have to fix the defect identified by the team. PM/PL decide whether they want to have Peer review for the project.

 

• Classification of defects:

Classification and analysis of defects is very essential for defect prevention. Ideally, defects should be identified into different categories like Critical defect, Functional defect, Cosmetic defects. All the defects should be reported in the excel sheet or special defect tracking tool.

 

• Assign And Scheduling Quality Assurance :

SQA ( Software Quality Analyst ) should be allocated to the project. He  play an important role in checking, verifying the day to day activities of the project and ensure that project is in good health

 

• Identifying Defect Prevention Representative (DPR)

 

             DPR does analysis for all the defects found in test cycles and come out with    some reports. Usually he draw some histogram and give presentation to the team for his analysis for all the defect. Idea behind this activity is defect prevention and learning.

 

 

Perform Quality Assurance:

 

A person who has task of performing Quality assurance for the project is called SQA ( Software Quality Assurance). He checks and verify all day to day activities and processes  of the project as per scheduled and  planned for the project. SQA ensure that project team is complied with the Quality related activities and process decided for the project. If he has some concerns for the project and he share it with project management and create some action plan to fix the issues.

 

Project team works on those action item. SQA verify the fixed action items and close it. He also give his suggestions/feedback if new processes is need for the project or project needs to deviate from the quality processes not relevant to the project. For example, some project may not require to do peer review at all because size of the project is small.

 

Perform Quality Control:

 

Performing quality control involves monitoring specifics project results to determine whether they comply with relevant quality standards and identifying ways to eliminate the causes of unsatisfactory results. It should be performed throughout the project.

 

The project management should have working knowledge of statistical quality control. A quality control department often performs quality control. Project team creates Project matrix which give the measurement of the processes followed in the project. Basically, metrics is based on the some formula, which can be vary project to project.

 

 For example formula to get % of review effectiveness= 100 * no of defect s found in review/ no of all defects found. Now suppose if you could find 8 defects in review and total number of defect are also 10. Then you will achieve 80% of review effectiveness, which is very good. Metrics also help you determine schedule variance, effort variance, cost of quality, and failure cost of the project.