Software development firms are now having bigger challenges to maintain the quality of the product than before. There can be multiple reasons behind it: ever increasing code weight and complexity around the codes and growing pressure to release the products quickly to the market at the competitive price. These reasons ultimately translate into shorter product development with controlled expenditure during the product development cycle. The consequence is “POOR PRODUCT WITH WIDE RANGE OF DEFECTS”.
Now the question comes, how can we give the better product with less cost? There are few important things to follow:
- Spend good amount of time during product designing phase: There are few products which have design constraints to handle the potential customers need and to augment more features. Here the proactive approach comes into picture and the product development group needs to understand the following questions: whether we know the potential customers (at least the top ten potential customers), whether we know the current need of the potential customers, whether we know the future need and deployment trends of the customer and whether we know the product behavior in present and future deployment scenarios and whether we know the predictable life span of the product.
- Proactively designing the deployment scenarios and guiding the customer to adopt the scenarios: It is always good to create in-house the deployment scenarios and to find and fix the defects. Further the field facing folks need to direct the customer to use the scenarios which are thoroughly tested by the System testing group. This is not always possible to do as different customer can use the product in different ways. But there should be an endeavor to train and to direct the customer to adopt the tested scenarios.
- Minimizing the field defects or customer found defects can help in reducing the incurring cost on the product: As all of us know, early defect finding is lesser costly than the later one. It is invincible to find all the defects during system testing but we should put our maximum effort to find the defects which could be seen by the potential customers. The System testing group should understand the potential customers’ deployment scenarios in which the product will be used. For a sure, this will help in reducing the field defects.
