Seminars
Quality is meeting the expectations and requirements of the customer. The mission of a quality assurance (QA) function is to define and manage the IS quality program. From this simple premise you can begin to implement a quality assurance function in your information technology department. Yet the recognition by many IS managers of the need for quality assurance is not universal. Indeed, some managers view quality assurance as a "nice to have" option but only under certain dramatic conditions (e.g., a major project is about to fail, users are complaining, their job is on the line, etc.) This attitude is equivalent to stating that meeting customer expectations and requirements are also optional, that somehow is immune from the need to continually provide excellent service. Such attitudes have led to the following statistics:
- 35% of all projects become runaways, busting budgets and schedules;
- 15% of all MIS projects fail to deliver anything;
- Cost overruns of 100% are common to MIS projects;
- 70% of all QA departments are less than 3 years old and most fail within the first year.
This class teaches how to produce quality software. The following are topics of discussion:
- The Quality Challenge
- The Nature of Systems
- What is Quality?
- Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control
- Managements Role in Quality Programs
- Quality & Productivity
- Starting a QA Group
- QA methods
- Measuring Quality
- Philosophy of QA
