Agile by Design

Chapter 15Building in Quality and Simplicity

While agile methods are designed to build product quality within all of its processes, an overall quality management approach is important to your analytic project. Quality management encompasses strategies for planning, assurance, and control (see Figure 15.1). For the analytic team, this can take the form of design and development standards and testing strategies. Agile teams use a variety of quality approaches similar to teams using traditional software development methodologies. What is unique in agile is not necessarily the quality process itself, but how it is incorporated into the analytic lifecycle. This chapter provides an introduction to project quality management, practices, and testing approaches that any analytic project team can leverage.

Figure 15.1 Quality Considerations

Quality Planning

Quality management plays an important role in the analytic lifecycle. Quality management activities represent a broad set of functions to proactively plan for and monitor product quality. Quality management processes help the project team ensure that the project deliverable meets its intended purpose. The impact of a “bad” predictive model can be disruptive to the organization in many ways: at worst, contributing to a loss of revenue or increased risk; at best, reducing the credibility of not only the team, but the ability of the ...