An appropriately designed experiment to compute project costs and durations for various combinations of junior and senior programmers or consultants can allow you to determine an optimal mix of personnel, given limited resources. Refer to the section on the Taguchi method later in this chapter for more information. Quality planning also involves communicating the correct actions for ensuring quality in a format that is understandable and complete. In quality planning for projects, it is important to describe key factors that directly contribute to meeting the customer’s requirements. Organizational policies related to quality, the particular project’s scope statement and product descriptions, and related standards and regulations are all important input to the quality planning process. As mentioned in the discussion of project scope management (see Chapter 5), it is often difficult to completely understand the performance dimension of IT projects. Even if the development of hardware, software, and networking technology would stand still for a while, customers often have difficulty explaining exactly what they want in an IT project. Important scope aspects of IT projects that affect quality include functionality and features, system outputs, performance, and reliability and maintainability.
•Functionality is the degree to which a system performs its intended function. Features are the system’s special characteristics that appeal to users. It is important to clarify what functions and features the system must perform, and what functions and features are optional. In the EIS example in the chapter’s opening case, the mandatory functionality of the system might allow users to track sales of specific medical instruments by predetermined categories such as the product group, country, hospital, and sales representative. Mandatory features might be a graphical user interface with icons, menus, and online help.
•System outputs are the screens and reports the system generates. It is important to define clearly what the screens and reports look like for a system. Can the users easily interpret these outputs? Can users get all of the reports they need in a suitable format?
•Performance addresses how well a product or service performs the customer’s intended use. To design a system with high-quality performance, project stakeholders must address many issues. What volumes of data and transactions should the system be capable of handling? How many simultaneous users should the system be designed to handle? What is the projected growth rate in the number of users? What type of equipment must the system run on? How fast must the response time be for different aspects of the system under different circumstances? For the EIS in the opening case, several of the quality problems appear to relate to performance issues. The system is failing a couple of times a month, and users are unsatisfied with the response time. The project team may not have had specific performance requirements or tested the system under the right conditions to deliver the expected performance. Buying faster hardware might address these performance issues. Another performance problem that might be more difficult to fix is that some reports are generating inconsistent results. This could be a software quality problem that is difficult and costly to correct
because the system is already in operation.
•Reliability is the ability of a product or service to perform as expected under normal conditions. In discussing reliability for IT projects, many people use the term IT service management. See the Suggested Readings on the companion Web site, such as ISO/IEC 20000, which is based on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
•Maintainability addresses the ease of performing maintenance on a product. Most IT products cannot reach 100 percent reliability, but stakeholders must define their expectations. For the EIS, what are the normal conditions for operating the system? Should reliability tests be based on 100 people accessing the system at once and running simple queries? Maintenance for the EIS might include uploading new data into the system or performing maintenance procedures on the system hardware and software. Are the users willing to have the system be unavailable several hours a week for system maintenance? Providing help desk support could also be a maintenance function. How fast a response do users expect for help desk support? How often can users tolerate system failure? Are the stakeholders willing to pay more for higher reliability and fewer failures? These aspects of project scope are just a few of the requirement issues related to
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