More Effective Quality Planning

Learn how can you make quality planning more effective in your organization. Let our experience with hundreds of teams illuminate the path for your team.

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About More Effective Quality Planning

Duration: 1.5 – 3 day course
Resources: Workbook, Online Companion Course, and more

A project’s approach to quality ultimately determines its quality–and also its cost, schedule, and functionality. Learn how to define end-to-end project quality in terms that support project goals, with a focus customizing practices to the needs of individual projects.

Your team will learn how to achieve quality throughout the project lifecycle—including numerous alternatives to end-of-project testing.

Defining Quality

  • Textbook Quality Definitions
  • QA vs. QC

Quality Goals

  • The ISO 9126 definition of quality
  • Characterization
    • Scaling a characteristic
    • Prioritization of characteristics
  • Establishing what it means to be “good enough”

General Strategy

  • The basic philosophy of software quality
  • Early removal of defects
  • Insulating from impact of defects
  • Using the PDCA cycle

Finding Faults

  • Common faults in software and where they are created
  • Identifying the defects
  • Tracking defects

Detection Toolbox

  • Peer reviews
  • Quality attribute workshops
  • Dynamic testing
  • Prototyping
  • Detection effectiveness

Approaching Quality

  • Basic approach
  • Lifecycles and characteristics

Implementing Quality in Requirements

  • Five whys
  • Task analysis
  • Vision & goals
  • Gists
  • Fit criteria

Implementing Quality in Design

  • Facilitated workshops
  • Architecture tradeoff analysis method
  • Design impact estimation
  • Personas

Implementing Quality in Code

  • Satisfice and softgoals
  • Optimization

Analytical Toolbox

  • Measures
  • Comparing discrete classes
  • Trending a class
  • Process control
  • Collecting data

Managing Software Quality

  • Organizational level quality
  • Process improvement

Establishing a Quality Culture

  • Growing capability
  • Selecting practices
  • Audits
  • Gates
  • Senior staff

Verifying Up Front Quality

  • Monitoring the project

Advancing Quality Tomorrow

  • Tasks by Role
  • Quality practices

You will learn to define quality in detail, clearly and verifiably, and to identify multiple and supportive ways to achieve your desired level of quality. You will balance early and late fault detection and integrate quality-related tasks with overall project goals.

This course is for individuals charged with ensuring or improving software product quality including:

  • QA Managers and Leads
  • Test Managers and Leads
  • Development Managers and Leads
  • Project Managers
  • Architects
  • Other development team members who want to improve the quality of their software products

We offer our courses online, privately at our training facility in Seattle, or at your location.

Customize this course

Your team has unique challenges. Learn about the ways we can customize this course to fit your needs.

“Used well, Agile development can improve quality. Used poorly, Agile development can make quality problems worse. This course distills lessons we’ve learned from working with hundreds of companies into grounded, practical advice.”

Steve McConnell, Author of More Effective Agile