Quality in Quantity: How App Quality Is Now Everyone’s Responsibility
Who, on a standard team, should be responsible for the product’s quality? Should it be the testers who are given a pile of code at the end? The developers who’ve been working on the project throughout? Maybe the product managers? Or could it be a single person at the end with a badge that in big, bold letters reads, “Quality Police”?
Although brandishing a shiny badge that gives you full quality control throughout a project’s lifecycle might sound cool in concept, quality has increasingly become a responsibility for not just one single segment of the team, but the team as a whole. Step by step and from phase to phase, it’s important for each member of a team—agile or otherwise—to have some hand in making sure that what’s being developed works as intended as it goes through each individual progression.
When asked about where the burden of quality lies, Bart Knaack, a test advisor at Professional Testing, told StickyMinds it should be with everyone—even if it doesn’t often shake out that way in your average business environment.
“The theoretical answer should be the entire team—however, in a lot of teams, we still see a small number of people focus on quality,” Knaack explained. “And yet, the demos do cater for an excellent moment of reflection on quality, and product owners now have a better view on the quality to be delivered.”
This idea of sharing the quality load is often called continuous quality, which refers to having complete control over the quality of your application throughout all stages of the development lifecycle. Similar to adopting agile, making use of continuous quality speeds up the process, engages more people, and gives you a greater chance of catching bugs earlier in development.
Beyond simply making a project run smoother and faster, putting the responsibility of quality on each member of the team reduces risk. Performance engineer Andreas Grabner made the point at STARWEST that instead of sitting around and picking out defects, it’s a team’s job to find solutions. By finding solutions, application-breaking issues can be removed before they reach the marketplace.
Grabner said, “Basically, you are part of a team that needs to deliver software to an end-user, and it has to be in the right quality. Otherwise, your business doesn't make any money.”
It’s a team effort. It doesn’t take long for a user to download your app, notice a lack of quality, and remove it from his phone without ever even thinking about it again. By making sure your quality is under control, that application will not only reach more people, but stay with them.
