Quality or speed – which should you look for in development?

Speed ​​and quality are certainly the main goals that any software development team aspires to. Speed ​​can help you build an edge over slower competitors while keeping your customer base engaged. Quality ensures that you give users the best possible experience with your software.

Unfortunately, aiming for both at the same time seems like a utopia. Rapid development can often sacrifice certain steps and instances necessary to ensure higher quality. Pursuing that superior quality takes time, which means that a quality-driven approach to development can trample any aspirations for faster time to market.

So, when starting a new software development project, you may feel forced to decide which is more important to you – speed or quality? Here, we'll review some things to keep in mind when making this decision, as well as some tips to make your choice easier.

Speed ​​as the main objective

The rise of Agile and DevOps methodologies and processes has had a major impact on software development over the last decade. The idea of ​​using an iterative approach to software development has certainly sped things up while also increasing the flexibility of the development team and increasing the instances of feedback that lead to higher quality.

With Agile development, companies can easily obtain results faster and with more than acceptable quality. However, these methodologies have sometimes been misinterpreted or poorly implemented, leading to an obsession with speed. Things got a little skewed, to the point that some teams started to think they no longer needed dedicated QA teams. Naturally, those who did this sacrificed quality because speed seemed more important to them.

Is this the wrong approach? Not necessarily. While having a minimum level of quality is a must for any modern software, speed as a priority may be understandable for certain projects and goals, including:

• New features for social media engagement
• New product without competition
• A strategic product or new feature in a stagnant market

We can easily illustrate this with Facebook's infamous motto “Move fast and break things”, which basically means that you should develop new things as quickly as possible and worry about quality later.

Facebook (and many other companies like it) have been able to get away with this mentality because social media is not an essential service. The company's main goal is to keep the public engaged, so it made sense to release new features as quickly as possible and tweak them later, using the platform's own users to test them.

The important thing to keep in mind, though, is that you can't focus on speed without taking anything else into account. In fact, you need solid QA on your side to help you meet the minimum quality threshold necessary for your software to be acceptable. This brings us to our next point.

What are quality control services?

Here's what you need to know.

#1 The Process

In software development, quality assurance (QA) is a procedure that aims to ensure the quality of the software being built. It focuses on improving the development process itself by continually tweaking it. Thus, QA (also known as QA testing) defines software creation processes, monitors the results produced by these processes, and adjusts them to make them more efficient and effective in accordance with quality standards.

#2 The guardians of quality

As you can see, the notion of QA is essential for quality, especially when using Agile methodologies. This is because QA and testing services are the guardians of quality when you accelerate during development. Making software testing an integral part of every sprint in your software development lifecycle is the only way to be sure that quality will be consistently present in any rapidly developed software.

#3 The capture

Does this mean that using QA with an Agile methodology is enough to achieve speed and quality? Not exactly. While software QA services can certainly bring more balance to the scales, there will be times when this will not be enough and you will need to take a different approach and slow down your development a little. Let's see when.

Quality as the main objective

There are some projects (and even entire industries) where it would be wise to focus primarily on the highest quality possible, regardless of how long development takes. This is because there are certain digital products that handle sensitive information or perform delicate tasks that cannot fail. Some of them include:

• Bank officer
• Financial
• Health care
• Retail
• IoT Projects

They all manage very sensitive and private data that needs to be handled with care. This means that the software responsible for powering these industries needs to feature excellent performance, a strong level of security, and robust backup and remediation systems in case something goes wrong. Delivering all of this takes a lot of development time, but given the stakes, organizations in these areas prioritize quality over speed.

Therefore, these types of projects and industries are expected to have a slower pace of development to provide the team with the time needed to thoroughly test the solutions they create. In this context, quality control plays a crucial role in ensuring that the processes used during the software development lifecycle are as efficient as possible.

A balance between speed and quality

As you can see, whether going for speed or quality depends on your business goals and overall requirements. You've certainly noticed, though, that while it's not possible to achieve both at the highest level, you can seek a balance that doesn't entirely sacrifice one of them. Quality control services play a key role in achieving this balance.

With quality control and software testing in combination with Agile and DevOps processes, you can pursue faster time-to-market with better product quality. It's true that you need to fully integrate QA services into development to ensure they don't fall through the cracks. This way, you can pave the way for continuous testing, which will have a significant impact on your final quality.

Some things to make this combination work more successfully include:

• Plan instances of QA from the beginning : Don't try to block QA later, and don't skip QA practices just because.
• Include test automation : Allows you to run regression tests, allowing you to focus on new features while automated testing takes care of old features.
• Use parallel testing : Use solutions that can run scripts at the same time rather than sequentially, which can significantly reduce the time required to perform unit, smoke, regression, and cross-browser testing.
• Use pair programming instead of code reviews : Code reviews are great for ensuring code quality, but they can be time-consuming. You can get the same benefits in less time with pair programming.
• Consider test-driven development : TDD is a good alternative if you want to reduce time to market, as it has moved testing to the development phase rather than doing it later.