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How do you ensure quality?

We are a programming team and our new clients start asking us “how do we ensure quality”.

What things they want to know about our quality? Obviously it’s not only the quality of the code, but also project managements, testing, bug fixing, support, etc.

Searching google for this query did not help much. Either I get stuck on software recommendation or some unrelated discussion.

Answer 9365

There are several ways to show them how you ensure quality, but here are the two broad ways to do it:

  1. Show them the documentation: Show them the non-sensitive documentation, if you can; which can speak about the processes and best practices being used by your team/company. This is more like offering self-help solution to their doubt.
  2. Show them the metrics: In some cases, the metrics and data can speak for you better. For example, the first-reply-time, the resolution time, etc speaks for your support quality.

Apart from that, you can also invite them to the office (works most of the times), and show them around. Show them how your team works, the culture, the best practices, and if possible, let them meet the team leads of the respective teams.

Answer 9395

I would look into certifications and, because you are software orientated, release management. For example-

Q. How do we ensure quality in Project Management?

Our project managers are certified PRINCE2 Practitioners.

Q. How do you ensure quality in software changes, versions and new releases?

We use a release management method that ensures that we document and test a bug fix/ upgrade/ support (delete as appropriate) works. We do this in a test environment and ensure that we have client User Acceptance Testing (UAT) before implementing in a live environment.

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