Steps to improve IT project quality

Improving quality in an IT project requires planning and discipline across the whole life cycle. Possible steps are as follows.

1. Understand and document quality requirements clearly: functional, performance, security, usability and compliance needs; agree on acceptance criteria.
2. Establish leadership and top management commitment: quality is a management responsibility.
3. Define and follow standards and processes: coding standards, design guidelines, documentation templates, ISO 9001, CMMI, ISO/IEC 25010.
4. Plan quality: prepare a quality management plan, metrics and checklists.
5. Use appropriate development methodology: iterative or agile approaches to get early feedback.
6. Improve the work environment: reasonable schedules and workloads, tools, training and motivation of staff (quality of people).
7. Reviews and inspections: requirement, design and code reviews, walkthroughs find defects early when cheaper to correct.
8. Rigorous testing: unit, integration, system, regression and acceptance testing with test automation; test early and continuously.
9. Configuration management and version control to manage change and avoid errors.
10. Defect tracking and root-cause analysis: Pareto and fishbone diagrams; fix causes, not only symptoms.
11. Risk management of technology and requirement risks.
12. Continuous improvement (Kaizen, PDCA), lessons learned.
13. Involve users and get feedback regularly.
14. Training and skills development for the team.
15. Use metrics such as defect density, defect removal efficiency and customer satisfaction.
16. Quality audits and maturity models.

Plan -> Do -> Check -> Act  (PDCA cycle)

Example: A software team adds peer code review and automated regression testing, which cut post-release defects by half.