Quality products and services to customers make an important contribution to long-term revenue and profitability and it is critical to maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty and reduce the risk and cost of replacing faulty goods. Your customers expect you to deliver quality products. If you do not, they will quickly look for alternatives.

Quality assurance is any systematic process to ensure that the end product or service being developed is meeting the specified requirements, its intended use, to fully satisfy customers’ needs and expectations, and is produced consistently with zero defects. It is a way of preventing mistakes or defects in manufactured products and avoiding problems when delivering solutions or services to customers. Quality obviously is influenced by the complexity of the end product, the number of processes required to make the product, and the exactness with which those individual processes are defined and controlled.

Software Quality Assurance consists of monitoring software engineering processes and methods used to ensure quality and can include ensuring conformance to standards and regulatory compliance. It provides confidence that quality requirements are fulfilled.

Two main principles included in quality assurance are: "Fit for purpose" (the product should be suitable for the intended purpose); and "right first time" (mistakes should be eliminated).

How software quality can affect organizations

A strong reputation for quality can be an important differentiator in competitive markets. Global competition requires that your product must be the very best by customers’ standards, or it will be replaced with a competitor’s product or service. The more robust the quality assurance program is, the higher the chances are that a business will survive and even thrive in today’s economy.

Quality influences your company’s reputation and credibility. Suitable quality is determined by customers, clients or users. Poor quality or a product failure that results in a product recall campaign can create negative publicity and damage your reputation. The growing importance of social media means that customers and prospects can easily share both favorable opinions and criticism of your product quality on forums, product review sites and social networking sites and companies can win or lose customers not linearly, but exponentially.

Effective and efficient quality systems can eliminate waste and the need for rework with overall financial and social benefits to the Company. Quality does not only relate solely to the end products and services a company provides but also relates to the way the company employees do their job and the work processes they follow to produce products or services.

Who is responsible for software quality in an organization?

The active involvement and commitment of senior management are critical in order to ensure that high-quality products and services are delivered at all times and satisfy the adequacy, suitability, effectiveness and efficiency requirements of the quality systems.

A company-wide quality approach is imperative and an organization must define its quality policies and objectives such as satisfying the customer's quality requirements, complying with regulations, or meeting environmental objectives. All organizational units must approach quality with an open mind where each employee takes responsibility for quality. 

Top management should ensure that an appropriate environment is available to the employees to enable them to operate efficiently and effectively. Suitable training plans with mentoring and coaching to build expertise are critical to foster teamwork and for employees to identify areas for process improvement.

How can we help?

Impimpi Technologies provides customized solutions that focus on the organizational needs and can include:
• Training and international ISTQB and IREB certification.
• Coaching and mentoring to develop well experienced employees and expert testing teams.
• Implementation or improvement of existing quality assurance processes.
• Software testing maturity assessments.
• Risk management.
• Testing as a service (TaaS)
• Implementing quality controls and assurance.