The Quality-Ready Advantage

Recently we released the early results from our Seapine Software Quality-Ready Assessment, a survey that evaluates key indicators of quality within software development organizations. After collecting data from over 300 respondents, the results indicate that the top two factors driving development organizations to focus on ALM solutions are:

• The need to quickly respond to customer requests and requirements
• The need to reduce risk by preventing poor quality from impacting customer satisfaction

Software quality and reliability are lifelines to customer loyalty, and profitability.  Yet development organizations still struggle to achieve quality and deliver their products on time and within budget.  Survey results indicate that more than one third of companies completed their application development on time and within budget less than 75 percent of the time.  The survey also indicates that 70 percent of the companies are undertaking one of following actions to improve the quality of their software development:

• Clearly defining quality metrics
• Undertaking pilot projects or proof-of-concepts pertaining to software development quality
• Seeking executive sponsorship for software development quality improvements

The respondents represent companies of every size. Sixty-nine percent are small companies (less than $250M in revenue), 22 percent are mid-size ($250M - $2.5B), and nine percent are large. The leading industries represented include high tech (32%), financial services (16%), consumer products/retail (9%), and telecommunications (8%).

Software development and QA organizations can complete the assessment on-line (www.seapine.com/qualityready).  Once the initial benchmarking data has been tabulated I’ll let you know how various organizations (by revenue and industry) compare.