What is Quality?
Quality software is a piece of code that is reasonably bug-free, delivered on time and within budget, meets requirements and expectations and is maintainable. Quality is also defined as meeting the customer’s expectations the first time and every time.
However, quality is a subjective and an abstract term. Quality depends on who the customer is and their overall influence in the scheme of things. Customers of a software development project include end-users, customer acceptance test engineers, testers, customer contract officers, customer management, the development organization’s management, test engineers, testers, salespeople, software engineers, stockholders and accountants.
Each type of customer will have his or her own slant on quality. The accounting department might define quality in terms of profits, while an end-user might define quality as user friendly and bug free.
Arun Vijayaraghavan is a Senior QA working for one of the world's largest Investment Banks. Arun has extensive experience in Retail Banking, Investment banking and non-life insurance domains.
