Project Quality Management Overview

Project Quality Management is a process of consistently measuring the quality of all project activities and taking corrective actions to improve the quality. It aims for the project to satisfy stakeholder needs.
Quality is defined as the totality of characteristics of an entity that satisfy stated or implied needs. Stakeholders, customers, and project outputs need to satisfy expectations. This includes meeting conformance to requirements and fitness for use.
Conformance to requirements involves meeting written specifications and completing tasks adequately. As an example, if a project mandates delivering 100 computers with specific processors and memory, verifying that aspect is part of this requirement.
Fitness for use implies the product functions as intended. As an example, computers with missing monitors or keyboards, sitting in boxes at the delivery point, are not fit for intended use.
Project quality incorporates the organization's quality policy, including planning, managing, and controlling project/product quality requirements to meet stakeholder objectives.

ISO defines quality as the total characteristics of an entity that contribute to its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.
Quality is also what the customer or stakeholder needs from project deliverables or output.
Other quality definitions are based on conformance to requirements (meeting written specs) and fitness for use (ensuring the product functions as intended).

Quality planning identifies the relevant quality standards and satisfies them. This involves establishing and documenting the standards required for the project.
Quality assurance evaluates overall project performance and ensures deliverables satisfy relevant standards. This process evaluates the project's adherence to quality standards and involves activities that aim to improve the quality management plan.
Quality control monitors and records specific project results. It ensures project outputs are complete, accurate, and meet customer or stakeholder expectations. This is a reactive process to fix defects and variances.

Quality planning identifies relevant quality standards and how to satisfy them. Quality requirements are established for project deliverables, and how the project needs to be managed is documented. Metrics for quality measurement are also incorporated (e.g., checklists). A quality management plan is created to guide execution and completion, outlining various quality processes.

QA is a process of ensuring the quality and delivery of high-quality products and services. This plan translation to executable activities that incorporate organizational quality policies into the project.
QA aims for continuous quality improvement.
Tools include quality audits to manage quality and inputs include the quality management plan, process improvements, measurements and project documents.
Key Activities:
- Process Audits: Review project processes to ensure compliance with the quality management plan.
- Process Improvement: Identify areas of process inefficiency or inconsistency, and implement improvements.
- Training: Equip team members with skills and knowledge to maintain quality standards.

QC monitors and records specific project results to ensure compliance with relevant quality standards, making project outputs complete, correct and meeting customer expectations.
It's a reactive process aiming to identify and fix defects or variations.
It is similar to QA, but QA focuses on improving processes to prevent issues, while QC focuses on inspection and identification of issues after they occur.
Key activities include:
- Inspection: Verify compliance of deliverables to quality requirements.
- Testing: Evaluate functionality/reliability using methods such as software testing, stress testing.
- Defect Identification and Correction: Log, categorize, and fix defects in deliverables.

QA focuses on process improvement and preventing defects, occurring throughout the lifecycle. Responsibility is ensuring proper processes.
QC focuses on product inspection, identifying and fixing defects at the end of specific phases or deliverables. Responsibility is ensuring defect-free outputs.

Tools and Techniques enhance quality control. Some include Pareto analysis (identifying contributors to most quality problems, often adhering to the 80/20 rule), Statistical sampling, and quality control charts.

Aims to identify vital factors contributing most to quality problems in a system. This is the 80/20 rule, often 80% of the problem due to 20% of causes.
Uses Pareto diagrams, which are histograms, to identify and prioritize problem areas.

Testing evaluates a product, service, or process to ensure it meets quality standards.
Types of testing include functional testing, performance testing, stress testing, and user acceptance testing.
Testing verifies if the product works as intended and meets customer expectations. Testing occurs throughout the SDLC.
Benefits include reduced defects for the customer and improved customer satisfaction/confidence in the product/service.

Unit tests ensure individual components (programs) are defect-free. Integration tests assess the interaction of integrated components, to ensure seamless workflow.
System tests evaluate the entire system, and user acceptance tests are conducted by end-users before official acceptance.

COQ is the amount spent dealing with quality issues during and after a project. COQ is broken into:
Cost of Conformance: Preventive costs for training, documentation, equipment, tests, and inspections to ensure a fit for use.
Cost of Nonconformance: Internal failure costs (rework, repair before delivery) and external failure costs (rework or repair after delivery) arising from not meeting quality expectations such as warranty support or issues. This includes capital costs of equipment to conduct preventive and appraisal activities.

ISO 9000 provides an international set of quality standards, suited for various organizations from manufacturing and service industries (e.g., design, development, and maintenance of products). ISO 9001 is a generic model instantiated for individual organizations using the standard.

Attributes include quality aspects of software such as safety, security, reliability, testability, usability, adaptability, reusability, resilience, modularity, efficiency, complexity, and learnability.