Quality Please

An intent jockey is trying to push forward quickly, but is riding Sap the giant tortoise and is barely moving at all. This must be very frustrating.

With the prevalence of the outsourcing model and the use of frameworks and tools that have been well marketed but poorly produced, overall software quality is nowhere that it can and should be. Quality software development isn't generally a subject that is understood and sought after these days and it's become rare to actually have a product delivered that you are happy with.

It is important for our customers to understand that Latitude 40 is dedicated to internal and external quality in all software we write. That may mean that our software development process will not be what you are used to if you've worked with other software consulting companies in the past.

Ready to take the next step? Schedule a no-risk consultation with the Latitude 40 team.

Quality Reduces the Cost of Change

In any industry, there is a trade-off between quality and quantity. The more budget you spend on the quality of a product, the less you have for production volume. This paradigm holds true in the software world (where "production volume" would be the number of features), but only for small projects that are not meant for feature expansion over time. For larger software packages that are meant to last and evolve, it is much cheaper in the long run to focus on quality up-front so later maintenance and changes are easier to make.

This can be seen in an illustration showing the costs of change during each phase of the traditional software development life-cycle. Conventional development techniques lead to a challenging and costly maintenance phase due to the resulting difficulty in making software changes or enhancements. More modern techniques coupled with good discipline leads to a greater flexibility to make such changes at any point along the way. This reduces the long term costs and increases the overall life of the software product.

A chart showing a climbing cost of change as you move through the typical development life-cycle culminating at a very high cost once the initial build is complete and you move into maintenance.

A graph showing a low and stable cost of change when adopting a quality-driven agile development philosophy.

Software Quality Glossary

Reliability

Ability for software to do exactly what it’s supposed to and to either prevent abnormal conditions entirely or react to those conditions in a graceful way.

Integrity

Ability of software to protect its components and data against unauthorized access and change.

Ease of Use

How easily people can learn to use your software and apply it to solve problems.

Extendibility

Ability for software to adapt to changing requirements whether during initial development or later when currently unknown specifications are being incorporated into future phases.

Reusability

Ability of software components to be used to build additional components and applications.

Verifiability

Ease of creating test data and detecting and tracing failures during validation.

Efficiency

Ability of software to put as few demands as possible on hardware resources, such as processor time, memory, or bandwidth for internet applications.

Portability

Ease of transferring software products to various hardware and software environments.

Reparability

Ability to quickly repair defects found during any project phase.

The terminology and definitions in this section are adapted from 'Object-Oriented Software Construction, Second Edition' by Bertrand Meyer.