Software Quality

Software quality is the degree to which a software product satisfies its stated and implied requirements. Quality management is the engineering discipline that plans, assures, controls, evaluates, and improves that degree of satisfaction across the product's lifecycle.

The dominant failure mode in quality management is treating quality as a testing phase rather than as a property that must be built in from requirements through operations. Testing is a detection activity — it finds defects after they are created. Quality management begins with prevention: defining what quality means for this product, putting the right process in place to build it in, and measuring the result against explicit criteria.

Philosophy