Three General Principles of Quality Assurance
The following are three general principles of quality assurance which I learned about at University and which I have found to be very important to keep in mind. Every now and then, you should take a moment to sit back and ask yourself the following:
- Do you know what you are doing?
- Do you know what you should be doing?
- Do you know what the difference is between both?
The first question is pretty straight forward. Of course, you know what you are doing, because you are in the process of doing it! The point here is to actually take a minute to think about what you are doing right now so that you can then better determine if you should keep doing it. Remember, you should be doing something to satisfy the requirements as specified by your users!
Once you have identified what you are currently doing, take a moment to look back over your requirements and see exactly what you should be doing. Its amazing how easily we can steer ourselves off in the wrong direction. This is often the result of some geeky desire to make something incredibly cool and awesome, which can be fun but potentially disastrous to a project.
Finally, now that you know what you are doing and what you should be doing, you can identify where you are heading in the wrong direction and fix the problem as soon as possible.
I know I know, it sounds like common sense, but it’s not as simple as you may think. How do you actually measure the difference between both? It’s not always going to be a clear cut situation! You will need to use certain methods which may be mathematical formulas, testing, inspection or metrics.
When in doubt, always go back to your users. Software development is all about the users. You can be the greatest programmer in the world, but your knowledge will be useless in practice unless people use the resources you develop!
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