My colleague Margo Visitacion and I are finishing up a new report, Seven Pragmatic Practices To Improve Software Quality, that will publish in a few weeks. We realized that not everyone has the same definition of quality. More often than not application development professionals define software quality as just meaning fewer bugs. But software quality means a whole lot more than just fewer bugs.

Forrester defines software quality as:

Software that meets business requirements, provides a satisfying user experience, and has fewer defects.

 

What It Means: Quality Is A Team Sport

Quality must move beyond the purview of just QA professionals and must become an integrated part of the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) to reduce schedule-killing rework when business requirements are misunderstood, improve user satisfaction, and reduce the risks of untested nonfunctional requirements such as security and performance.