Software Quality versus Time-to-Market: How to Resolve These Conflicts?

Abstract

As software becomes more and more part of revenue generation processes in all industrial domains, and as development cycles shorten significantly, the challenges of producing high reliability and quality as well as adhering to shorter time-to-market requirements have hit the software community. As unsuccessful cases demonstrate, the solution is neither to throw unreliable software on the market prematurely, nor to be late with high quality software. The key seems to be choosing the appropriate development model, selecting partnership models based on strengths and weaknesses, and using development processes in a goal-driven way. There is a big difference between product and process oriented development models. Which one is appropriate under what circumstances?

The new Internet age offers so far unknown opportunities for collaboration — which collaborations add value and which ones are counterproductive? All software methods and processes can be used in different ways. If used rigorously (as defined in theory) they take a long time. How can we use ‘light’ versions of methods to save time, but do not sacrifice essential quality requirements? All these questions will be discussed and illustrated with examples. The goal of this presentation is to understand some of the options for achieving reliability and quality under tight time constraints.