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Software development: Improve efficiency with a Quality Management approach

The development of custom software is increasingly demanded by small and medium-sized companies that seek to improve the profitability of their businesses through digital transformation. In response to these demands, companies, freelancers and freelancers that seek to attract these clients, do not always achieve desired levels of efficiency and therefore fail to retain their clients.

One of the solutions to this problem is to implement a Quality Management System in your company or business based on those regulated in ISO 9001: 2015. But if you consider that you are not yet in a position to achieve it, then you can introduce some of its fundamentals and principles and adopt best practices. Here I explain how to do it from a practical perspective.

Main concepts and principles of Quality Management

Let's look at three fundamental concepts that you must master when managing a custom software project:

Requirements, is the need or expectation established by the client in the software that he has hired. Some are explicit such as functional and non-functional requirements; others are implicit as processing and response times.

Quality, the software developed is considered to be of quality if it meets all the customer's requirements.

Customer satisfaction, is the perception that the client has about the degree to which their expectations have been met. In general, this perception will not be built only on the quality of the software received, but on the set of experiences accumulated during the project: communication, response times, punctuality in delivery, among others.

Seven principles of a quality management system

It is also important that you understand and adopt the seven principles of a quality management system:

Customer focus
You must capture and understand the current and future needs of the client and make it the center of the project. Earn and maintain his trust and feel your commitment to him.

Leadership
The development team must have a leader who clearly establishes and communicates the objectives of the project. You must assign the tasks to the rest of the team according to their abilities and keep them motivated and committed to the project.

Commitment of people
You must ensure that the entire development team is involved and committed to the project, that they understand their responsibility and impact on the results of the software. This will help you to perform their tasks with quality without the need for excessive control.

Process approach
Projects will become more coherent and effective if you understand that all their activities are interrelated and that their management is not only individual, but these interrelations must be understood and addressed, the impact that some activities have on others. In this way you will guarantee that everything that a team member develops does not negatively affect what is developed by others. Individual tasks must create synergies between them.

Continuous improvement
During the development of custom software, you must identify errors and problems before they reach the client and continuously improve both the way of developing it and the way of managing the project.

Evidence-based decision making
During the project you will have to make decisions constantly, but these should not be based on opinions, doubts, hunches, but you must base them on the information you obtain from the project and the conclusions that you can reach from the analysis of this information. An example is the balance of the team's load and capacity, a team member may constantly express to you that the assigned work is too much for one person or that the times of the tasks are not realistic. Before assigning another resource for these tasks, you can analyze the work capacity of other team members and identify the real causes of this problem.

As a summary, I want to tell you that implementing a quality management system guarantees software development companies to improve the efficiency of their projects. But when they don't have enough resources or maturity then they can begin by gradually introducing their principles. In another iteration they may also implement the requirements of the ISO 9001: 2015 standard

Other key factors that will lead you to effective management of your software projects adopt agile methodologies for development such as Scrum. You can also rely on management tools such as Trello.

At The Cloud Group we have extensive experience in the development of custom software based on agile methodologies and a robust quality management system. We can help you improve the profitability of your company through the computerization of your processes:

Or you can contact us and tell us your wishes and we will determine how we can help you.