Improving Your Products

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Quoted from NASA’s Software Process Improvement Guide: “There is an evident need to implement some means by which every software activity provides new and improved insight into continually improving methods for developing and maintaining software; every experience must be used to gain new knowledge.”

Whether your products are software based or not, improving them can benefit from adopting software improvement procedures, and it requires asking how you can make your products…

• operate faster?
• easier to re-create?
• with less material?
• smaller and/or more compact?
• automatic?
• operate from a faster environment?
• easy to customize?
• easy to document?
• develop faster?
• easy to organize and/or manage?
• easy to debug?
• easy to use?

In each phase of product development, the above issues could be addressed while defining…

• product features and the tasks they perform
• functions used to read and produce output
• functions used to modify external information
• functions used to store information
• functions used to handle errors
• functions used to hide information
• functions use to perform other tasks
• where features will exist
• how features will be activated
• what the feature will look like
• how features will be tested for functionality

After analyzing and (hopefully) coming up with some solutions to these issues, you’ll have one more very important question to ask. This question should be addressed to each individual solution: How can my solution be used over and over again on new development projects?

In the beginning, when you start this “improvement” process, you’ll probably notice that the “process of creating a process” slows you down and doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement at all. However, as you create a solution for each issue, and mold the solution in such a way that it can be re-used on future projects, later development will subsequently become faster and easier as long as your solutions are incorporated into the projects.

External Resources:

1. 16 Steps to Product and Process Improvement
2. ISO 9000-3: A Tool for Software Product and Process Improvement
3. Applying Quality Principles in Product Development