Quality Managements in Projects

Quality is the degree to which the project fulfills requirements. Quality Management then is following policies and procedures to ensure that the project meets those requirements. In general quality management is divided in three areas which are quality planning, quality assurance and quality control.

There were two points about quality management that resounded with me.

Gold Plating
In IT projects, we are all about gold plating, trying to give the customer more that he wants. "Lets plugin this feature where the customer can view this document in pdf, xls, xml, txt, csv, sanskrit.." Did the customer ask for this in his requirements document. If yes, then we should be building the particular feature else not.
Gold plating introduces bugs or holes in our products.

From this page

Gold-Plating is the process of building bells and whistles into an application that were not called out by the end-client.

This is so true. Eager programmers (and I am guilty as well) will go out of their way and build a feature in that is not required. This causes their other responsibilities to get postponed and thus slowing up the project.

Quality Assurance
PMP is big monstrous process where if you read the PMBOK, you will see that there plans and processes and plans and processes. There is documentation and checkpoints and every stage that ensure that its processes and plans are followed.

On the contrary we have agile development and test driven development (TDD). TDD is all about quality where you are developing tests before you write any code. Though this is not comprehensive quality control, it does address parts of it.

As I study I keep trying to figure out to what degree does PMP apply in IT projects. The search is on.

Here is good page for bullet points on quality management.

Update: An article on quality at pmstudent.

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