Software bugs are called “bugs” for a reason: These pests have been around for a long time, they always turn up in code at the most inopportune times, and there’s no proven way to eradicate their existence

“Quality cannot be sprinkled onto an application right before it gets exposed to your clients,” the analysts write. “Rather, it must be a part of the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) from inception through implementation. As such, responsibility for quality falls squarely on the shoulders of the application development manager—it is not solely the responsibility of QA professionals.” Here are brief encapsulations of the seven steps five directly from the Forrester report

Pragmatic Practice 1 Define Quality to Match Your Needs

Impact on Quality: Meet business requirements; achieve a satisfying user experience.

Benefit: Your ability to achieve quality is improved because the application development team is not charged with unrealistically perfect expectations. Rather, it is chartered with a definition of quality that fits the given time, resource, and budget constraints.

Relevant Roles: Business stakeholders; entire application development team

Pragmatic Practice 2 Broadcast Simple Quality Metrics

Impact on Quality: Reduce defects.

Benefit: Highly visible metrics keep quality top of mind for the entire team and expose when efforts fall short.

Relevant Roles: Entire application development team

Pragmatic Practice 3 Fine-Tune Team/Individual Goals to Include Quality

Impact on Quality: Meet business requirements; achieve a satisfying user experience; reduce defects.

Benefit: Team members perform according to their incentives, making quality improvement part of their goals reinforces desirable behavior.

Relevant Roles: Management

Pragmatic Practice 4 Get the Requirements Right

Impact on Quality: Meet business requirements; achieve a satisfying user experience.

Benefit: Less rework means less retesting and fewer cycles, which greatly reduces the overall effort.

Relevant Roles: Managers, business analysts, user experience designers, architects.

Pragmatic Practice 5 Test Smarter to Test Less

Impact on Quality: Reduce defects.

Benefit: A focus on testing the most crucial and at risk areas ensures that they receive the lion’s share of test resources and that any bugs that slip through are likely to be confined to the least-important features.

Relevant Roles: Quality assurance, managers.