Quality Wishes - the seven notes of quality

How can Software quality professionals change the face of quality and software quality assurance in 2011? Inspired by ASQ initiative of Quality goals for 1022, here is my list of 7 wishes for software quality and hope that we can work towards these!

Wish # 1: Audits do not unearth mistakes. Only improvements - This calls for a mindset change in audits. Correcting mistakes do lead to improvement, but would it not be better to shift the focus and look for improvements rather than mistakes?

Wish # 2: We don’t make the same mistake twice - There is an age old saying, “Make only new mistakes”. In the context of an organization, we can safely assume that only the mistake first made anywhere within the organization counts as the new one. Do we believe that the mistakes we make are always new? Or do we try to find out mistakes made earlier and not repeat them…

Wish # 3: We reach a CoQ of 25% - We are happy to test less and save money for our clients. 

Wish # 4: A project award is instituted for the project that failed badly after trying – Should we not give reward for taking risks and creating learning’s?

Wish # 5: A working code is not the only goal - Meeting all functional requirements is probably less than 25% in a project. Making the application live up to performance requirements, maintainability (less time to maintain), usability (easy to use), secure will have to be of utmost importance.

Wish # 6: Project data is treated like money. We don’t waste it - There is no compromise made in project data – be it effort, defects, size, schedule, Requirements etc.. Will anyone accept 1 dollar as 90 cents?

Wish # 7: Customers don’t set SLAs. We set them – Performance standards are set by projects and we constantly beat them. No more waiting for some else to tell us what is quality!

My goal for 2011 would be to start working on realizing these goals in my work. Hopefully I can share updates a couple of months down the line!