Ensuring Software AlignmentTomer Peretz

About Me

• Chief software architect at Orbotech

• Presidency member at ILTAM

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Agenda

• Understanding quality scenarios

• Capturing the right quality scenarios

• Validating software alignment with quality scenarios

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What is the Quality of Your Product?

• There is no such thing as absolute Quality.

• Quality is related to specific needs.

▫ Having a product with less bugs does not mean that its quality is better

• Quality needs are measurable.

• Quality needs may influence each other.

• Aligning software quality with business needs is one of the roles of the SW architect.

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Quality Attributes

• Influences development measurements.

▫ TTM of the next module or new features

▫ Serviceability and maintenance costs.

▫ Security and IP protection

• Reflects our customer needs from our products.

▫ Competitive engineering argue that the quality attributes are usually the real business differentiators

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Alignment With What?

• What should our software be aligned with?

▫ Business

▫ Customer

▫ End user.

▫ …

• Question of strategy

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Capturing the Right Quality

Scenarios

The Traditional Way

• SW team leader

• SW architect

• System engineer

• Project manager

• Product manager

• Marketing

• Customer representative

• ..

• End user19

The Broken Phone Syndrome

• The longer the communication path between the end user and the developer, chances are higher for communication errors.

• 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑒𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠 =1

𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑠2×

𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑠

1

𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒2× 𝑐𝑜𝑔𝑛𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑏𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑟

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The Modern Way

• Customer on site

• QAW

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The Modern Way Barriers

• The stakeholders may be:

▫ Globally distributed

Different time zones

Don’t speak the same language

▫ Too occupied in other projects

▫ Don’t exist yet

▫ Don’t really care

▫ Too many stakeholders

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Are Customers Involved?

• You don’t always want your customers to know about your new products.

▫ Security, Non-disclosure

• Have customer representatives

▫ What exactly are the customer representatives?

▫ How do they represent the customer?

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Are Customers Involved?

• Customer needs are not always aligned with the business needs.

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Too Many Customers

• Market Survey

• Data mining

▫ Samsung add social media listening as part of their QAW.

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The Psychology of Number Estimation

• Cognitive biases

▫ Halo effect

▫ Anchoring

▫ Groupthink

▫ Cognitive dissonance

• The existence of a single expert in the group, on average make the estimations worst.

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Prioritizing the Quality Scenarios

• Prioritizing quality scenarios should take into account

▫ The business goals

▫ The marketing strategy

▫ The customers

▫ The users

▫ …

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Differentiated Strategies

Performance Conformance Reliability

Low Cost Service User Experience

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Understand Your Product Concept

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Validating Software Alignment

With Quality Scenarios

Validating Quality Attributes

• Product Box

▫ Visualize your product before it exists.

Use physical elements

▫ Play user scenarios, make sure they make sense.

• Minimal Viable Product

▫ Create a working product with minimal efforts to be validated by the real users.

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Validate Your Assumptions

• Some tradeoffs are based on constrains.

▫ These constrains can change and enable better tradeoffs

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Validate The Way End Users Use Your

Product• Get real usage measures.

▫ Web

▫ Log files

▫ Internal database

• Use computational methods for validation.

▫ Are your quality scenarios aligned

▫ Are there other quality scenarios that you are not aware of

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Manage Quality Gaps

• Reflect your current situation

• Map your gaps

• Estimate cost of each gap

• Change numbers and priorities upon results

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Align Target?

Ensure Software Alignment

Collect and Prioritize

Validate

Business Goals

Customers

End Users Observe

Understand

Measure

Assumptions

Model

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Resources

Software Architecture in Practice, SEI Series in Software Engineering

The Lean Startup, Eric Ries

Marketing Management, Philip Kotler

Design Thinking

Experience of Combining the QAW and Social Listening for Better

Architecture, Seung Ho Nam

List of Cognitive Biases

Competitive engineering

Damaged Goods, R .J. Denecke & R. P Mcafee

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Thank You

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You may contact me for information on:

• This presentation

• Orbotech career opportunity

• ILTAM Activities

tomer-p@orbotech.com