Six seasoned practitioners who have had success on the application quality front were invited to share their insights during a Compuware InTelligence roundtable discussion in Chicago. Moderated by Fred Diamond of Compuware's QA Center product line, the roundtable participants described the challenges of implementing quality programs and compared notes on ways to overcome the hurdles. The key is to define those as early as you can. Customer expectations are very important. It means defining requirements well so both sides know what's expected.
Requirements are the key to almost everything, including testing.
A lot of places have a difficult time distinguishing between good and bad requirements. There's a crying need for some training in this area. During the successful projects that I've worked on, all of the parties reviewed not only the requirements, but also the design documents and prototypes and were involved in testing. If it was a multiphase project, they revisited requirements before coding started in each phase. Considering how fast businesses change, if you're not revisiting requirements every step of the way, you're probably doomed to fail.