Software quality. It’s not necessarily top of the agenda at board meetings. That’s because it’s something that IT teams own and handle themselves. After all, Quality Assurance (QA) is baked into the modern approach to software development, right?
The thing is, these days, every company is a tech company. That means software quality has a huge impact on things like business continuity, time to market, and risk management. If business-critical software goes down, so does revenue, reputation, and productivity.
Here’s why board members need to pay closer attention to software quality.
Software as a valuable business asset
Software and its quality is no longer just an IT issue. In fact, if your day-to-day business operations rely on software – from making sales to processing payments – that software is now a valuable business asset.
At board level, you might not be responsible for software quality, but you do have a duty to ensure business continuity. And in today’s tech-driven world, the two are intrinsically linked.
Protecting your software assets and managing the associated risks is of paramount importance to your business.
That’s because when you’re dependent on a particular software service – and it fails – there are direct consequences. These include both reputational and financial costs, not only due to the error itself, but the actions required to put things right for customers.
Software as a competitive advantage
Software quality is nothing new. From car manufacturers to content publishers, software – or more precisely, high-quality software – is what separates market leaders from the rest of the pack. Take car manufacturing, for example, where the software inside electric vehicles has helped companies like Tesla seize market share away from traditional leaders such as Volkswagen.
Software built using Agile principles also gives companies the ability to adapt and iterate in response to the needs of the market. But it also needs robust quality management to minimize bugs and mitigate errors. By following standards such as ISO/IEC 25010 Systems and software engineering companies can ensure that their software fits with a product quality model, and that their risk management processes are clearly defined.
For board members, software quality is one of many aspects of risk management alongside finance, the environment, and productivity. It also has a direct correlation with cost – the cost of downtime, the cost of putting things right, and the cost of low productivity.
Don’t let poor-quality software cost your business. Speak to a specialist at BonCode
