“How much quality do you want?” This is a question that is never asked in application development, but it should be— up front and often.
Application development teams commonly view quality as a step that happens at the end of the development process and the responsibility of the quality assurance team (QA).
At first glance, this seems reasonable as it is the job of QA to ensure that code passes various tests, that the application is stable and trustworthy, and that new features meet user acceptance criteria. But in reality, quality is not determined by whether or not a box is checked.
Quality starts at the beginning, when goals and outcomes are defined, a timeline is established, and resources are deployed, and continues throughout the entire application development process, from architecture and design straight through to deployment and round again with every new feature release.
