As any other business investment, quality assurance must bring value. The value expected from quality assurance is making the software processes more efficient while ensuring that the end-product meets customers' needs. Translated into measurable objectives, that means preventing schedule creeps and going over budget; reducing re-work in the requirements, design and coding; ensuring efficient discovery and elimination of defects before they reach the user – in short, making the software processes better and thus making the final product better as well.

In order to achieve this goal, we at Conflair help our clients to improve their processes to install quality assurance activities in every stage of the software life cycle. For each such stage, there is one or more QA support activities focusing on ensuring the quality of the process and of the resulting product. For example:

• Project Plan Review – before you start investing time, money, and resources in the project, it's worth checking out whether the plan has covered all the bases, if it's feasible in terms of timeline and resources, or even – simple – if it is complete.
• Requirements Review – once the Requirements are written but before more resources are engaged in translating them into design and code, it's useful to review them for correctness, completeness, testability, etc. - and fix the issues while they are still on paper.
• Pre-release Quality Status Evaluation – you've executed your tests. Defects were logged, and now the question is To Release or Not To Release. An analysis of application's quality level in terms of the impact of the defects discovered can help to make a rational decision based on sound data obtained through quality metrics.

Having quality assurance activities for all stages of the software life cycle can bring significant savings. In fact, the earlier QA is applied, the higher is its ROI. Finding a problem in requirements can cost ten or more times cheaper to fix than fixing the same issues when found in testing: fighting a paper tiger is easier than a live one.

We at Conflair have many years of experience in helping companies in a variety of industries to improve their software processes. From startups to federal government, our expertise has helped to ensure that software is delivered quicker and better. We can help you as well.