Chapter 7:
Project Quality
Management
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Quality of Information
Technology Projects
• Many people joke about the poor quality of IT
products
• People seem to accept systems being down
occasionally or needing to reboot their PCs
• There are many examples in the news about
quality problems related to IT (See What Went
Wrong?)
• But quality is very important in many IT
projects
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What Is Project Quality
Management?
• The International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) defines quality as the
totality of characteristics of an entity that bear
on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs
• Other experts define quality based on
– conformance to requirements: meeting written
specifications
– fitness for use: ensuring a product can be used as it
was intended
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Project Quality Management
Processes
• Quality planning: identifying which quality standards
are relevant to the project and how to satisfy them
• Quality assurance: evaluating overall project
performance to ensure the project will satisfy the
relevant quality standards
• Quality control: monitoring specific project results to
ensure that they comply with the relevant quality
standards while identifying ways to improve overall
quality
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Modern Quality Management
• Modern quality management
– requires customer satisfaction
– prefers prevention to inspection
– recognizes management responsibility for quality
• Noteworthy quality experts include Deming,
Juran, Crosby, Ishikawa, Taguchi, and
Feigenbaum
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Quality Experts
• Deming was famous for his work in rebuilding Japan
and his 14 points
• Juran wrote the Quality Control Handbook and 10
steps to quality improvement
• Crosby wrote Quality is Free and suggested that
organizations strive for zero defects
• Ishikawa developed the concept of quality circles and
using fishbone diagrams
• Taguchi developed methods for optimizing the process
of engineering experimentation
• Feigenbaum developed the concept of total quality
control
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Figure 7-1. Sample Fishbone or
Ishikawa Diagram
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Quality Planning
• It is important to design in quality and communicate
important factors that directly contribute to meeting
the customer’s requirements
• Design of experiments helps identify which variable
have the most influence on the overall outcome of a
process
• Many scope aspects of IT projects affect quality like
functionality, features, system outputs, performance,
reliability, and maintainability
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Quality Assurance
• Quality assurance includes all the activities
related to satisfying the relevant quality
standards for a project
• Another goal of quality assurance is
continuous quality improvement
• Benchmarking can be used to generate ideas
for quality improvements
• Quality audits help identify lessons learned
that can improve performance on current or
future projects
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Quality Control
• The main outputs of quality control are
– acceptance decisions
– rework
– process adjustments
• Some tools and techniques include
– pareto analysis
– statistical sampling
– quality control charts
– testing
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Testing
• Many IT professionals think of testing as a stage
that comes near the end of IT product
development
• Testing should be done during almost every
phase of the IT product development life cycle
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Figure 7-6. Testing Tasks in the
Software Development Life Cycle
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Types of Tests
• A unit test is done to test each individual component
(often a program) to ensure it is as defect free as
possible
• Integration testing occurs between unit and system
testing to test functionally grouped components
• System testing tests the entire system as one entity
• User acceptance testing is an independent test
performed by the end user prior to accepting the
delivered system
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Figure 7-7. Gantt Chart for Building Testing
into a Systems Development Project Plan
Project 98 file
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Improving Information
Technology Project Quality
• Several suggestions for improving quality for IT
projects include
– Leadership that promotes quality
– Understanding the cost of quality
– Focusing on organizational influences and
workplace factors that affect quality
– Following maturity models to improve quality
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The Cost of Quality
• The cost of quality is
– the cost of conformance or delivering products that
meet requirements and fitness for use
– the cost of nonconformance or taking responsibility
for failures or not meeting quality expectations
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