How Businesses Can Overcome Challenges Around Improving Software Quality
Software issues can turn up in project processes at the most inopportune times. In today’s competitive business climate – a dearth of staff and time along with cost pressures – have made the need for improving software quality a more apt manta for project departments and development teams.
While it may be possible to oversell quality into software or an application right before it gets exposed to your target audience, making it a part of the software development life cycle, from inception to implementation, and even after the release, could lead to better results. This is important to do because when software quality is compromised, your business can face product delays, productivity issues and higher cost for application development and support. And in some cases, quality issues can result in poor customer satisfaction that jeopardize your brand and put an end to your competitive advantage.
So, what steps can a business take to resolve bugs and overcome the challenges around software quality? The following are some of the steps that can help businesses reduce software defects, validate proper functionality and ensure a satisfying end user experience:
Documentation
Documentation is an important step of coding that is often neglected. Some software developers think it is not their responsibility to document, while others just don’t undertake it because of time constraints. Documentation of functions and how sections of codes should work can significantly help with debugging.
Software departments can start by creating a skeleton of a new method/class/function, then create the documentation. This will help you in getting a much clearer picture of what is expected to be achieved before you set out.
Coding standard and peer reviews
Use a consistent layout and indentation across all the software code; not only does it make easier for you to read and modify but it also makes it easier to debug when there are any issues discovered in the future.
Software creators are often afraid of peer reviews because they don’t like their code being criticized and other developers can be quite harsh in some instances, but it can be very useful to have someone review and spot things you may have missed. The application could improve in general just after a couple of reviews, and this may also lead to discovery and patching of security vulnerabilities in the initial code.
Testing tools
When a business requires better testing methodologies, they have the option to utilize test management tools that manage their project requirements, test cases, issues and bugs in a single integrated environment, with full traceability throughout the testing lifecycle. Such tools provide the ability to execute test sets containing predefined test case groups so that the testers can follow instructions and identify if the system being tested is behaving as expected.
Then any deviations from expected behavior can be recorded as defects and managed in tracking modules. This would allow quality assurance software testing activities to be carried out exactly as specified by the software developer or project manager.
Automated solutions like these can always help your business ensure that old functionality is still working as expected after the code is modified. It involves verifying that a previously integrated feature still functions correctly after fixing bugs or adding new features, which could take a long time if done manually.
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