Quality Grid
A
quality grid is a
requirements work
product consisting of a matrix documenting the relative
criticality of the different types of
quality
requirements.
The typical objective of a quality grid is to:
- Document the absolute importance of the quality
requirements to the stakeholders.
- Enable the requirements team to:
- Prioritize the quality requirements for scheduling
implemenation.
- Allocate their time wisely when elicitating, analyzing,
and specifying the quality requirements.
The typical benefits of a quality grid are:
- Quality grids ensure that all of the different types of
quality requirements are considered.
- Quality grids make it easy to verify that quality
requirements are properly prioritized.
The typical contents of a quality grid are:
- Quality Factor Row Headers.
- Importance Column Headers
- Cells documenting the associated importance of the
quality factor.
- Associated comments and rationales.
The typical stakeholders of a quality grid are:
- Producers:
- Evaluators:
- Approvers:
- Maintainers:
- Users:
Quality grids are typically produced during the following
phases:
Quality grids typically can be started if the following
preconditions hold:
The typical inputs to an external card include:
- Work Products:
- Stakeholders:
- Ensure that all quality factors are considered including
both those that are developer-oriented as well as those that
are user-oriented.
- Almost all quality factors will be relevant for large,
complex, business-critical applications.
- It is important to annotate the cells to:
- Deal with situations where a quality factor has
different levels of importance when applied to different
parts of the application (or component).
- Provide a rationale for critically-important quality
factors.
- Typically, the more important a quality factor is, the
more expensive it will be to obtain it. Thus, typical
projects cannot afford to rate all quality factors as
critical.
- Ensure that the distribution of importance levels to
quality factors is balanced. It is highly unlikely that all
quality requirements are critical, that all are equally
important, or that all are unimportant.
- Columns are provided for each level of importance because
this makes it easier for stakeholders to determine if the
allocation of importance levels to quality factors is
balanced.
- The more important general quality is, the more likely
that most of the quality factors will be given high levels of
importance.
- There is typically no need to maintain the quality grids
once their information has been incorporated into the quality
requirements section of the
system requirements specification.
- Quality girds are typically developed incrementally,
iteratively, and in parallel with other requirements work
products.
Quality grids are typically constrained by the following
conventions:
-
Content And Format Standard
-
Inspection Checklist