Shifting Quality.....

This is a follow on to a recent article I wrote about "Testing Being a Bottleneck". When thinking about the Cost of Quality the mistake many IT Organizations are making when looking to reduce costs is looking straight at the testing organization. What they fail to look at is the The Cost of Poor Quality which are both Internal and External failure Costs. According to the American Society of Quality (www.asq.org) Internal and External Failure Costs are defined as;

Internal failure costs

• Internal failure costs are incurred to remedy defects discovered before the product or service is delivered to the customer. These costs occur when the results of work fail to reach design quality standards and are detected before they are transferred to the customer.

External failure costs

• External failure costs are incurred to remedy defects discovered by customers. These costs occur when products or services that fail to reach design quality standards are not detected until after transfer to the customer.

The point being that absolutely we can reduce testing costs but testing is the last leg in a race. I can build a Best In Class Testing Organization with the best people with the best skill sets, have the best tools on the market, have test and process automation at every turn, have the best metrics program and the best processes BUT what people tend to forget is that a testing organization is a product of what happens before it.

Why not gather the data to look at where defects are getting injected into the SDLC and pin down where they should have been caught or prevented in the first place. As most of you know the later you find a defect in the SDLC the more it costs to fix it. There's an old saying "We always find the time to fix an issue time and time again but we never have the time to do it right in the first place".

Both internal and external failure costs can be addressed. So many companies are dealing with 3rd parties that are delivering code drops or data feeds into their environments to help them complete their end product to their customers. Gathering data to illustrate how poor incoming quality impacts not only their productivity but also the risk it puts on their timelines but also the increased costs they are incurring, it is paramount to use this data to have that conversation around doing things right the first time.

At NIIT our philosophy is about building quality in versus testing quality out. We have created a framework to look at both Internal and External failure costs and how to work collaboratively across organizational boundaries to do things right the first time and look at both Preventative and Appraisal Costs. If you'd like to hear more about how we build quality in to everything we do please drop me an email at adrian.oleary@niit-tech.com