Quality

Customers expect their software to be developed according to high quality standards. But what does this mean?

• meets all the user requirements
• is well documented
• is easy to be maintained
• has no bugs or unusual behaviour
• is easy to be enhanced and extended
• contains large portions of reusable code
• is affordable

Everybody who deals with computer software knows that a program which completely meets all these requirements is hard to find. Software development is a complex technology and it will probably take some time for perfect software to be available.

However, we focus on applying the most up-to-date technology in quality assurance. Unfortunately, there is no magic wand we can raise to get there. Instead, we have established a number of procedures to allow verification of both the development progress and the development results.

The following lines show examples of some of our mandatory quality management procedures:

• Milestones, resources and major tasks of a project are defined in a project management plan.
• Any code is subject to reviews to make sure that at least two people have scanned every line of code.
• Code documentation is created together with the actual program. This documentation is updated every time the code gets changed.
• telos has defined coding conventions to which all code must comply.
• Regular status reports are created for each project to allow a continuous monitoring of the actual project status.
• Right at the beginning of a project a risk analysis is performed to identify potential problems that could occur during the project and to estimate the consequences of such events.
• The quality manager is responsible for maintaining the processes and quality management manual. This manual is a "living document" as the experiences we made need to result in feedback to our quality system.

For telos quality is not a thing that can simply be added to a software package. Instead it is a way of working which assures that all relevant processes are transparent and can be verified.

Quality also incorporates the idea of constant improvement. Knowing that especially in the area of software development long term success is bound to the ability of improving skills and technology, we utilise our quality system as an instrument to introduce new ideas, technologies and procedures.

ISO 9001 is just one step, telos works improves its process according to the different levels of the Capability Maturity Model CMM.