Submitted by: Submitted by grahagold
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Category: Science and Technology
Date Submitted: 10/20/2015 03:44 AM
An SDLC has three primary business objectives:
- Ensure the delivery of high quality systems;
- Provide strong management controls;
- Maximize productivity.
In other words, the SDLC should ensure that we can produce more function, with higher
quality, in less time, with less resources and in a predictable manner.
4.1 Ensure High Quality
Judging the quality of a wine or a meal is a subjective process. The results of the
evaluation reflect the tastes and opinions of the taster. But we need a more rigorous,
objective approach to evaluating the quality of systems. Therefore, before we can ensure
that a system has high quality, we must know what quality is in a business context.
The primary definition of quality in a business context is the return on investment (ROI)
achieved by the system. The business could have taken the money spent on developing
and running the system and spent it on advertising, product development, staff raises or
many other things. However, someone made a decision that if that money was spent on
the system it would provide the best return or at least a return justifying spending the
money on it.
This ROI can be the result of such things as: operational cost savings or cost avoidance;
improved product flexibility resulting in a larger market share; and/or improved decision
support for strategic, tactical and operational planning. In each case the ROI should be
expressed quantitatively, not qualitatively. Qualitative objectives are almost always
poorly defined reflections of incompletely analyzed quantitative benefits.
The SDLC must ensure that these objectives are well defined for each project and used as
the primary measure of success for the project and system.
The business objectives provide the contextual definition of quality. There is also an
intrinsic definition of quality. This definition of quality centers on the characteristics of
the system itself: is it zero defect, is it well-structured, it is...