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Product reviews: quality control without stepping on developers!
Subject:Product reviews: quality control without stepping on developers! From:"Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 28 May 2001 14:08:55 -0400
Shelly Kapoor wonders: <<Do you follow a strict review process in your
respective organizations? We had a demo and the prospective clients pointed
quite a few typographical errors in product screens and Web pages et al. It
has now been decided that product screens, written communication, and Web
pages will be reviewed before they are viewed by external customers.>>
Not "strict", but pretty comprehensive anyway. When I document our software,
I'm looking at the screens etc. as I do so, and I pass on any errors I catch
to the developers, who are generally more than happy to fix the problem.
(The fact that I'm also our editor helps; they're used to making corrections
that I propose. But more to the point, they don't like their managers
yelling at them for producing errors, so we're all on the same team when it
comes to fixing errors before anyone else sees them.)
<<How should I integrate a review of this sort in the SDLC without stepping
on a few toes and maybe upsetting a few developers?>>
If management has already decided that the reviews are required before
external customers ever see the product, make sure management communicates
this news to the developers. Once that's been done, it's your job to sit
down with the developers and figure out how you can do this as painlessly as
possible for both of you. For example, one of our developers preferred for
me to make the corrections on printouts; another let me work directly in the
resource file that contained the strings of text applied to dialog boxes and
buttons. Work with the developers, not against, them, and you'll generally
come up with a solution you both can live with.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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