What’s in a name? Many similar-sounding terms are applied to various aspects of software quality, often inconsistently and incorrectly, which can impact quality outcomes and effectiveness. For instance, many who are called “Quality Assurance (QA)” actually do Quality Control (QC), which can mean the organization fails to receive real QA’s benefits. Similar issues pertain to “Quality Management (QM)” and “Quality Engineering (QE).” This interactive session explains and differentiates these important terms.

• How terminology issues impact Quality outcomes and effectiveness
• Distinguishing QA, QC, QM, and QE
• Gaining respective benefits of each without undue overhead

Robin F. Goldsmith, JD is President of Go Pro Management, Inc. consultancy and SQGNE. He advises, assists, and trains business and project professionals to get right results right through discovering REAL business requirements, Proactive Testing™, Proactive Software Quality Assurance™, REAL ROI™, project and process management and metrics, and Beyond the Textbook™ software acquisition and outsourcing. Author of Discovering REAL Business Requirements for Software Project Success and the forthcoming Cut Creep—Write Right Agile User Stories and Acceptance Tests, he regularly contributes to international standards. A client described Robin’s unique problem-solving ability, “He understands us better than we do.”

In Robin's experience and analysis, QA/testers tend to be weak in two areas critical to testing: data and business logic. Typical QA/testing training ordinarily overlooks both. Our March meeting addressed important aspects of data, using visualization to help understand and communicate data’s meanings.

Scott A. Helmers, Partner at the Harvard Computing Group & Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP) for Visio, presented “Drowning in data? Create business intelligence dashboards with software you already have.”