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Discover 3 steps to improve your product today...

We all want to develop the best possible product at the lowest possible cost.  After-all, that's how we make money, isn't it?  By developing premium products at a lost cost and thus improving our margins.

So, how come it is hard for so many, yet so easy for some?

The answer lies in these three techniques that leading companies use whenever they develop a product.

1. Capture Requirements

It's no secret that leading companies generally have a good handle on what their customer's needs are.  These companies understand their customers so well, that they can often predict their customers' needs.  They do this by carefully observing their customers and recording their observations.

Some record their observations formally, while others record them informally.  Either way, the act of recording requirements provides several benefits:

• You are forced think carefully about the requirement
• By writing a requirement down, you distill it into a simpler form
• You can more effectively communicate a written requirement to others
• You remember the requirement better because you wrote it down
• You can check periodically to see that the requirement has been met

Let's focus a second on the last two benefits...

Remember when you were in school and your teacher told the class that you could bring a single cheat sheet in to a major exam?

I'll bet you spent hours creating a cheat sheet that had all of the important stuff crammed in the smallest print you could stencil onto the 3x5 regulation notecard.

Do you remember ever looking at that notecard again?  I'll bet you did, but only to confirm what you had already remembered... what you had internalized.

Writing down a requirement works the same way.  By going through the process of clearly understanding your customers' needs, distilling the needs into a small handful of requirements, and writing these requirements down, you have already taken the first step to improving your product.

2. Tie Requirements to Test Cases

So, now you have a list of requirements in-hand.  Does that mean that your product will automatically improve?  Of course not!

If it were that easy, they wouldn't call it "product development".

Then what comes next?

Requirements tell you "what" the product must do, and in some cases may even go so far as to describe "how" the product should do it.  But they don't check to make sure that the product actually delivers.  For that, you need test cases.

The problem is, if you just write a handful of ad-hoc test cases, you have no idea whether or not your product is delivering on the requirements that you so carefully recorded.

For that, you need to "tie" your requirements to the test cases.  You need to create clear relationships between your requirements and your test cases.

The problem is, most of the time, these are "many to many" or "many to one" relationships.  In other words, the more complex the action, the more requirements are tied to a single test case (or vice-versa).

In order to keep all of these relationships straight, many companies use multiple complicated test case spreadsheets.  Others use elaborate custom-built documents.

Few have discovered the secret that enables them to manage these complex relationships easily and dynamically.

These lucky companies have found specialized Quality Assurance and Risk Manager packages such as DiagZ.  They use these tools to manage these requirements and test case relationships so that their teams can focus on delivering the product instead of juggling spreadsheets and documents.

These tools achieve three very important goals:

1. They reduce ambiguity by clearly demonstrating requirements test coverage
2. They highlight risk areas to the entire development team
3. They help drive a project to closure as requirements are implemented and validated

Imagine how many unnecessary discussions over the validity and status of requirements could be avoided by simply capturing all requirements and their associated test coverage in an easy to access format!

3. Test Products and Capture and Manage Issues Effectively

Wouldn't it be great if all developers could implement a given requirement perfectly the first time?  If that were the case, then our products would never have problems, right?  Perhaps so, perhaps not.

The reality is, we always find something about our products that could be improved upon.  Whether it is something that can be controlled through careful design or not, at one time or another, we all find issues with even the best product implementations.

The question then, is not whether or not we will find issues, but how we will manage them once we find them.

Here again, we see many different approaches.

Some companies keep lists of issues on everything from post-it notes to handwritten documents.  Others maintain complex spreadsheets that enable them to prioritize their issues and tie the issues to requirements and/or test cases.

Others still have discovered the secret that enables them to quickly and effectively determine the risk associated with each issue.  These companies have an edge over the competition because they inevitably spend less time reviewing and discussing issues and more time resolving them.

This secret weapon in the fight against product flaws and imperfections is the issue management system!

Tools such as DiagZ enable companies to capture issues immediately upon failing a test step within a test case.  These issues are automatically tied to the test case, and thus the requirement from which the test case was generated.  Project managers are immdiately informed of the existance of a new issue and can assemble those team members needed to resolve it.

If integrated into the development team's culture, issues become a topic of interest to all team members because each individual team member can quickly determine his or her role in resolving and ultimately closing the issue.

Now we're talking team effectiveness!

How Does This Improve My Product?

You may be asking yourself; "How does this relate back to my product development?".

The more time your team spends "managing" requirements, test cases, test results, and issues, the less time they spend "developing", "implementing", and "validating" the product.

If your team was able to benefit from these powerful tools, just imagine how much more they could accomplish!  Now imagine that at any point, the entire team could see where the project's risks were.  Whether they were features that had received little or no testing, or issues that were impacting development.

By providing clearly visible relationships between prioritized requirements, test cases, test results, and issues, your team knows exactly where the project risks lie and has a much better chance of addressing them early in development.

The end-result is a much, much better product!

The Quality Factory is pleased to announce our new monthly newsletter!

Through this special newsletter, you'll also learn new ways to:

• Cut development costs
• Prioritize team efforts
• Create a culture of quality at your company

The secret tips and tricks in this newsletter will help you both improve the quality of your products and services AND reduce your development costs.

... and receive timely tips on improving your products and driving your costs down!.
You’ll even get a coupon for 5% off any Requirements EValuator product purchase.