Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

2.4. Summary

This chapter covered the quality characteristics you need to bear in mind with everything that you do and implement. You've also seen what is involved in construction quality and the processes and practices you can employ to ensure your outputs are of a high quality. You've seen how you can better prepare yourself for testing and issue resolution. You might not be able to totally eradicate these situations, but you should do whatever you can up front to minimize them and keep costs and timescales under control. Quality needs to be factored into the scope so that the budgets and timescales can be realistically set and agreed on.

The following are the key points to take away from this chapter:

• The quality characteristics apply to everything you do. Quality is not just about code quality; it applies to all the artifacts that you produce and deliver. You should think about how each of the individual characteristics could apply to the particular item or artifact you are producing.

• Construction quality echoes throughout the project. You need to ensure that your construction processes and practices are tuned to produce high-quality outputs and deliverables. Some key activities and practices include:

  • Validating requirements and designs and documenting queries and questions that need to be addressed before the component can be closed off completely

  • Producing and reviewing low-level models and designs

  • Developing and reviewing unit test scripts and test data to ensure breadth and ...