Zhijun Zhang, University of Maryland, Computer Science Department
Product quality assessment is a critical step to achieve better quality in both product and process respects. My position is that although from the point of view of the project, product quality assessment is for delivering better product, from the organizational point of view, it should lead to the understanding of the strong and weak parts of the development process and the project team. From this understanding, a better process model may be formulated, with general steps and principles and variations relating to project features. Also from this understanding, the characteristics of the members in the project team can be better understood, guiding the staff arrangement for future projects.
Although process quality assessment can be done with regard to general principles or standards, instead of doing assessment of product quality first. My position is that the latter way is more relevant and "context-sensitive" to a software organization. The kind of product and project team the organization is going to have are likely to be the same for some time. Analyzing them by finding problems in the product and then relating them to the problems in the process is quite within the business context of the organization. The changes made to the development process according to this assessment and analysis will tend to yield better process quality under the specific organization context, which in turn will facilitate the generation of better products.