Quality Management

Quality management and assurance is a very important and often overlooked portion of software development. It is important to hold your software up to a certain standard and ensure that any requirements are not just lazily fulfilled, but are fulfilled to the best capabilities of the developers.

In larger organizations there is often a dedicated quality assurance team that is responsible for testing and finding ways to optimize previously developed code. In order to assist this team there must be some level of organization. Firstly you want to initialize an organizational framework, then apply specific quality processes and lastly establish a quality plan for the project itself.

Quality assurance and quality management vary from place to place, sometimes there is a huge focus on it and sometimes not. Sometimes QA and QM are separate branches, and sometimes they are one in the same.

There is not much of an emphasis on QA in schooling however. We are often told that there may be a better or more optimal way to do something, but it is not an emphasis. A few classes have mention of optimization (going over the best sorts and searches, O(), etc). It would be nice to be directed in how to look for ways in which to improve the quality of our code. Many a time I have looked at code I've written years ago and gone "oh no". I understand that we begin with learning the basics, but we aren't told what to look for in cases of improving our code quality, it's a bit of trial and error in learning this.