Summary

In this chapter, we've taken a look at that most difficult topic, assessing quality in a software project, and created a framework for assessment in an iterative requirements process. We learned that the nature of iterative development adds a few quality assessment challenges, specifically , the lack of programmatic phases and complete artifacts that can be assessed. However, iterative development provides certain major advantages as well. The very existence of an iteration serves as objective evidence of both the product and the process used to create it. We just have to be clever enough to understand that we are operating in a mode of successive refinement, rather than in a search for absolute levels of completeness or conformance, at any particular time. In software development, at least, there are no such absolutes, and we must content ourselves with the fact that our iterative process provides us a way to get closer and closer to that ultimate quality goal.