Quality Management Plan

A project on software development is going to take place on network virtualization by the software development division of the company Micro Focus. The project manager is assigned to ensure that the project and quality objectives would meet after the implementation of the project. The software would enable both internal and external method of virtual networking, along with the increase in overall throughput and performance benefits (Cohen et al., 2017).

 The implementation of the project would be beneficial for the various stakeholders in different aspects. Such as, for the end users of the software:

• It would reduce the investments in networking hardware like cables and hubs.
• It would eliminate the complexity and maintenance cost of the real-time network along with reducing the overhead.
• It would increase the range of network availability, security and efficiency as the network traffic would be less.

To determine the quality need of the proposed software, the project manager would use certain quality models for determining the capacity of the software to satisfy the requirement of the project. In this particular project, Boehem’s quality model is used. The model would consist of a hierarchical structure, which would define the high level, intermediate level and the basic or fundamental level characteristics of the virtual network software at the time of the development (Brown et al., 2017).

The performance expectation of the software is determined in order to build the further strategic implementation policies. The project, in this case would discover and capture the network performance factors such as latency, bandwidth, throughput, packet loss, would test application performance against the network performance of real-time, and would optimize the overall performance benefit of the virtual network (Cohen et al., 2017).

Performance metrics are the factors calculated in order to measure the behaviour, activity and the performance efficiency of an organization along with the other relevant factors like customer value and requirement. In the context of agile project management, the primary performance metrics for the implementation of virtual network software are

• Lead time
• Cycle time
• Team velocity
• Open and close rates of the production (Snyder, 2014)

There are many tools to analyse the performance metric of a software project. It has been reported in a global survey that almost 75% of the organizations all over the world use Key Performance Indicator (KPI) as the tool of performance measurement (Parmenter, 2015). In this project too, the management would use KPI as an indicator of the key performances.

The main reason of using KPI in the software development project is to measure the performance of the throughout the project and to analyze how well each individual stakeholders of the project is working against their particular objectives (Kerzner, 2017). In this particular project, KPI works broadly as different tools.

• KPI as a navigational tool: The proper implementation of KPI would tell the project manager whether the overall development of the software is working at a proper dimension to achieve the goal or not.
• KPI as a decision maker:The effective KPI is related to the strategic objective of the project. Hence, from the business point of view, selecting KPI as an indicator would be beneficial for the company to increase the commercial usage as well.

One of the primary keys to a successful software development project is to identify the stakeholders and to divide the roles and responsibilities among them. The method that would be used in this particular project is Role and Responsibility Charting (RACI), which would identify the functional areas of the project, find the ambiguities and resolve them using a cross-functional collaborative effort (Elhady & Abushama, 2015).  The roles those are identified in this process are the role of sponsors, client project lead, project manager and solution architect, the development team, supporting team, testers and the team of maintenance. The usage of RACI reduces confusion and clarifies potential areas, which are tended to confliction. 

Quality Metrics

The quality requirement of a project is the specifications of a software project. In this particular project, the requirements are as follows:

• Consistency
• Correctness
• Feasibility
• Availability
• Usability
• Performance
• Maintainability
• Customer feedback

The quality requirement management of a software project consists of two criteria. They are software quality assurance and quality control. Quality assurance focuses on the assurance of the quality needs to be fulfilled, while the quality control focuses on the methods of fulfilling the quality requirements (Sarrab, Elbasir & Alnaeli, 2016). The integrated work of the team according to their roles and responsibility would fulfil the requirement of the project in optimized time.

Monitoring the quality and performance of the development of the project is most important in a project plan in order to ensure that the objectives of the project are going to meet.  A project-quality-monitoring (PQM) model is a systematic disciplinary procedure for the project manager to deliver a systematic approach to standardize in the product delivered. In this particular project of software development, the monitoring method would ensure the similarity in effective measurement methods, KPI identification, assigning critical success factors and the flexibility of accessing the project time to time (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017). The monitoring of quality and performance would specifically focus on risk analysis, process validation and demonstration of the feasibility of the project.

After the implementation of the project, an assessment would be done in order to evaluate the quality and to ensure that the project has reached its goal. The best way to assess and evaluate the software is honest customer feedback. Data would be collected from various customers through surveys, interviews, observations, walk-through, online advertisements and social networking sites for analysis. Moreover, the beta testing of the software would be performed among selected customers to gain the feedback (Lewis, 2016). The quality assessment will be performed on the result of these procedures.   

References:

Brown, T., Anthony, J. J., Chalfant, S., Gingrave, M., & Vines, B. (2017). U.S. Patent No. 9,563,919. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Cohen, R., Lewin-Eytan, L., Naor, J. S., & Raz, D. (2015, April). Near optimal placement of virtual network functions. In Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2015 IEEE Conference on (pp. 1346-1354). IEEE.

Elhady, A. S., & Abushama, H. M. (2015). RACI Scrum Model For Controlling of Change User Requirement In Software Projects. International Journal of Application or Innovation in Engineering & Management (IJAIEM), 4(1), 214-220.

Kerzner, H. (2017). Project management metrics, KPIs, and dashboards: a guide to measuring and monitoring project performance. John Wiley & Sons.

Lewis, W. E. (2016). Software testing and continuous quality improvement. CRC press.

Parmenter, D. (2015). Key performance indicators: developing, implementing, and using winning KPIs. John Wiley & Sons.

Sarrab, M., Elbasir, M., & Alnaeli, S. (2016). Towards a quality model of technical aspects for mobile learning services: An empirical investigation. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 100-112.

Snyder, C. S. (2014). A guide to the project management body of knowledge: PMBOK (®) guide. Project Management Institute: Newtown Square, PA, USA.