Quality is all about balance: creating more long-term value for your business while reducing your development costs.
Traditionally, the process of improving quality has been focused on improving the products. However, a more cost-effective approach is to invest in improving and nurturing the people creating the products: the producers.
The different professions that are part of software development cannot be taught by compiling a closed set of guidelines and practices. Software development is more complex than that.
Most of the practices and guidelines for promoting the quality of requirements, architecture, design, implementation, testing, and even project management are context sensitive.
The only way to gain the awareness to quality and the knowledge required for achieving it is by building up the experience of the people doing the work in a guided manner - helping them grow to be professionals.
The Lucid Quality approach helps organizations nurture their human assets, improving their skills, turning them into professionals while perfecting the products they create at the same time, and using the same resources.
The Lucid Quality approach is based on a powerful synergy of two core activities: Ongoing Mentoring and Professional Reviews. Both types of activities work together, and in times are even merged into a single activity, to build people's experience with the help of a professional mentor in the context of their day-to-day work.
Professional reviews are conducted by an expert mentor with two goals in mind: to perfect the product under development and to build up the producer's knowledge and experience based on the real context in which he operates.
Professional reviews are not oriented at finding problems in the work of the people creating the product. They are designed to prevent such problems to begin with.
Ongoing mentoring will help the people creating the product improve their skills and become professionals. The only way to do this is by working with them in the context of their day-to-day work, helping them solve real-world problems.
Ongoing mentoring is based on professional reviews as a main platform, but it also includes ongoing consultation to individuals and teams, and lateral activities. All these activities are led by a team of professional mentors.
The data being compiled during the professional reviews includes invaluable information. Using Tracking and Analysis, the Lucid Quality system becomes a powerful tool for continuous improvement.
The analysis of the data helps the Professional Quality Team build better and more focused mentoring programs. At the same time, the analysis process will help the organization improve the entire development process by identifying recurrent problems, which might be solved using better processes or tools.