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Ensure functional qualityAn IT lifecycle imperative
Software application quality depends upon a lot more than simply the absence of defects. Consider the consequences of improperly captured business processes, poorly extensible architecture, inflexible code – none are necessarily the result of bugs but all can badly affect end user satisfaction. What can IT do to better ensure the high quality delivery of business applications? |
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As more and more business processes are encoded in software, businesses can ill afford to treat quality as a late IT lifecycle concern. Gone are the days when testing is simply lip service paid to a compressed schedule that mandates deployment despite delayed application delivery with minimal analysis. Such an approach leads to cancelled projects, missed deadlines, poor quality software, deployment inefficiencies and high rework costs. The cost of fixing a defect found in a deployed application is 15 times higher than the cost of fixing that same defect during coding1.
The Ensure Functional Quality imperative demands that organizations overcome this problem and build quality into an application in each phase of development and on through deployment.
Responsibilities include:
- Ensuring an efficient development process that enforces a team focus on quality.
- Meeting the business needs of customers through well validated and maintained user requirements and business processes.
- Reducing the cost of development through proactive unit testing and code analysis.
- Improving IT efficiency through the formal communication of operational requirements and application architecture and design decisions.
The IBM IT lifecycle solution for the Ensure Functional Quality imperative fulfills these requirements.
With IBM's assistance:
- Analysts and developers can find and fix defects and design flaws early in the software development lifecycle.
- Testers can focus on the end user rather than on unreliable code that shouldn't have reached the QA department.
- QA managers can reduce time to deployment through shorter test cycles.
- Systems managers can reduce the incidence of application rollback.
- IT managers can oversee significant reduction in rework costs.
| See your IBM software sales representative for more information about how the following products can be used together to help you better Ensure Functional Quality. |
| IBM Rational ClearQuest |
Flexible workflow management, defect and change tracking across the project life cycle. |
| IBM Rational RequisitePro |
A requirements and use case management tool that promotes better communication, enhances teamwork, and reduces project risk. |
| IBM Rational Team Unifying Platform |
Provides teams with the infrastructure tools, processes, and integrations they need to work together more effectively. This solution unifies a team by providing common access to development assets, communication alerts and processes to maintain project momentum and focus. |
| IBM Rational Software Architect |
A design and construction tool for software architects and senior developers creating applications for the Java platform or in C++ that leverages model-driven development with the UML and unifies all aspects of software application architecture. |
| IBM Rational Functional Tester |
An advanced, automated functional and regression testing tool for testers and GUI developers who need superior control for testing Java, VS.NET and Web-based applications. |
| IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Response Time Tracking |
Monitor and trace application transactions end-to-end to identify and isolate end user response time performance problems. |
| IBM Tivoli Monitoring |
Automates monitoring of essential system resources, to detect bottlenecks and potential problems, and to automatically recover from critical situations. |
| IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON® DE for Distributed Systems |
Collates information from a wide variety of systems management monitors in a single location, including multiple OMEGAMON XE monitors as well as third-party software. |
1 Source B. Boehm & V. Basil "Software Defection Reduction Top 10 List", IEEE Computer
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