Quality Code: Saves Money
Quality Code: Saves Money
Project advocates of all varieties often have to sell the notion of quality assurance to management and other stakeholders. Stakeholders outside of the direct process often mistake quality assurance as an expense. While I cannot speak to other fields, in software quality assurance is a source of savings and properly demonstrating that value can save projects.
Faster Software Iteration
Projects that make use of rapid iteration need to make sure they are moving forward. Before moving forward developers often have to deal with regressions - errors that arise as a result of changing the code. QA tools like integration tests, judicious use of unit tests, and static analysis can help keep the project moving, saving precious time and money.
Bugs Cost Money
Bugs cost money and kill productivity. QA is a small price to pay for decreasing the overall occurrence of errors. You can spend sometimes 10 hours a week fixing random bugs, or you can spend an hour a day in QA while moving forward. As part of a project management process, QA allows developers to spend more time working on what matters: building more and better software to sell.
Quality Is An Easy Sell
Everyone wants quality. Project managers want to be impressed by forward progress. Much like a normal project, rolling out quality assurance in an organization takes time. What no one wants is for a stakeholder to spend 3 weeks rolling out TDD processes instead of working on the feature that is due in 2 weeks. Quality assurance works when you sell small, easy fixes to management.
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