software development - IT'S BROKEN

Seth Godin asks this question, providing an example of how dumb calendar applications can be:

If I try to schedule an appointment for 2 pm, it requires me to not only hit the 2, but also select pm. I have never once had a meeting at 2 am. Shouldn't it know that?

Many of the readers of IT'S BROKEN are engineers, computer science students and business analysts--people who are or will be soon introducing new software to the world. If you are one of them, and haven't read The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity yet, please put it in your to-read list immediately. This book will help you make smart software that focus on the users' needs, rather than powerful, feature-rich, complex software that is so frustrating to use that will make your users happy to defect as soon as a better product comes along.

I’ve been working in software development for a while, but I’m still getting used to the usage of the term QA. The activities of the software QA groups that I have seen are centered around proving, with some level of confidence, that a software works, where works means it-does-what-the-requirement-says-it-should-do.

While this is important, it does not embrace the more important aspects in my understanding of Quality Assurance. So here’s my take on defining QA & QC based on experience in Software & Hardware development as well as Manufacturing management and engineering:

QA - Provides information to upper management regarding the likelihood that the marketplace will accept (buy) the product; and analyzes and improves the process that produce the products.

QC - Measures the outcomes of the process through testing and inspection and passes the results to QA for analysis.

To give this some practical sense, consider a company which designs and manufactures bicycle sprockets. At a high level the product life cycle follows a path like:

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