Quality Conundrum: Risk
Comprehensive Quality Assurance is Key
Today's business environment means risks sometimes have to be take to obtain competitive advantage.
However, unmanaged risks in IS developments can have disastrous consequences. Application failures can lead to a loss of external and internal confidence and cause damage to your brand, which in turn can have a negative effect on the revenue stream.
Software defects in live systems can bring businesses to a halt, and can be very costly even if repaired quickly. When a live application fails, consider what can happen:
- Users may be unable to process business transactions.
- The failing application(s) must be identified, corrected and re-tested.
- If the failure has caused data corruption then the extent of this must be analyzed.
- In the event of repeated failures the users will become disenchanted with the application and lose confidence.
If you replace the word 'users' with 'customers' in the above, the problem reaches a new level of magnitude. A system failure has the potential to affect every prospect, customer and supplier. An unreliable internet application equates to commercial suicide - and online customers are your least forgiving audience. Once customers lose confidence in the application - and that loss of confidence happens very quickly - they will simply seek an alternative source of supply timely, comprehensive quality assurance is the key contributor to managing risk to the business from application failures.
To read more about "Time" in the Quality Conondrum please click here. If you would like to read about "Resource". then click here.