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09. Quality Management

At a glance

  • Module: 09 of 13 · Part III — Planning Knowledge Areas
  • Sessions: S19 (Week 10)
  • Level: Intermediate
  • Estimated time: ~5 hours
  • Prerequisites: Module 03

Overview

Quality is famously hard to define and easy to argue about. This module separates the ideas that are usually conflated: what quality means for a product, how you plan to achieve it, how you assure that you are on track, and how you control it through testing and review.

The recurring theme is that quality is built into the way work is done, not inspected in at the end.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this module you should be able to:

  1. Define quality in terms of fitness for purpose and conformance to requirements.
  2. Write quality criteria that are specific and verifiable.
  3. Distinguish quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control.
  4. Explain the difference between verification and validation.
  5. Design a proportionate testing and review strategy for a given project.
  6. Explain technical debt as a quality concern and reason about when to accept it.

Lesson plan

# Lesson Session Status
01 Quality Management and Assurance S19 Available

This module has a single session, so Lesson 1 covers all five outcomes together: the two senses of quality, quality criteria, quality planning, assurance and control, verification and validation, and testing strategy. Technical debt is treated as a deliberate trade-off within that lesson rather than as a separate topic.

Lab

Lab 20 — Quality Planning and the Cost of Quality does exactly that, and adds the arithmetic: three quality approaches costed across prevention, appraisal, and failure, with a break-even analysis that converts an argument into a fact.

Case study

A case on a quality problem traced back to process rather than people is planned. See the Case Studies overview.

Self-assessment

A module quiz is planned. See the Self-Assessment overview.

Key terms

Quality · Quality assurance · Quality control · Verification · Validation · Defect · Technical debt · Acceptance criteria — see the Glossary.