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Published on: 08/01/2008
Type of content: White Paper
Format: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
Length: 20
Price: FREE

Overview
Hurwitz & Associates sees a major transition in the way organizations are approaching software quality management. These organizations are adopting new approaches such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a way to create agile reusable business services that are intended to help them respond to rapid changes and business opportunities. Managers of these organizations have come to the realization that their SOA strategy is only as good as the quality of their software. With this realization, forward thinking IT management is mandating a new approach to managing software quality. They are moving their development organizations away from narrowly-focused, traditional testing methods to a lifecycle approach to managing software quality.

In the past, quality management typically meant testing software code. This testing usually occurred at the end of the software development cycle, after many of the important decisions about requirements definition; reliability, usability, and cost were made without any input from the “testers.” The software development process has also been hampered by conflicting goals and insufficient communication between software development and quality teams. Software developers are tasked with creating software assets on time and on budget. Managers responsible for software quality struggle for their voices to be heard and are seen as delaying the time-to-market for the resulting product. These conflicts can lead to missed opportunities to control quality at various stages - including requirements, architecture, code development, testing, and delivery - of the software development process. This lack of a consistent, predictable, and repeatable approach to software quality management throughout the software development lifecycle often results in projects that are destined to run over budget, miss deadlines, and fall short of customer expectations.

This paper will consider how companies are working to overcome these obstacles to achieving consistent quality in the software delivery process. Hurwitz & Associates reviewed the IBM Rational Quality Management solution and then interviewed nine IBM Rational customers to understand their challenges and priorities for following a lifecycle approach to software quality management. The majority of these companies cited the following factors as very important in their decision to implement the Rational Quality Management solution: improving software quality, improving collaboration, increasing efficiency, and decreasing downtime. Most of these companies realized a significant improvement in test efficiency and reuse and observed a moderate to significant improvement in time-to-market dates after implementing Rational Quality Management solutions. Further implications of a lifecycle approach to quality management and details of the customer survey will be presented.

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