#QualityFirst: Concurrent Engineering
Let's talk about Concurrent Engineering today. What is the first thought that comes to your mind when you think about concurrent engineering? Is it multiple teams working parallelly? Well, that could be but today we will talk about concurrent engineering from a quality perspective.
At some places, the Quality engineering team is working more aggressively towards the end when the product is ready or about to be ready. This approach definitely gives some breathing room to the quality engineering team but adds more risks to the software development life cycle. Risks like finding multiple bugs towards the end and not having enough time for fixing and retesting. Another example is finding flaws in the design and atomicity of work items and testing too late to change the design. Quality Engineers here learn about the product very late in the process and cannot ensure if the end product is really testable. Whether you use Waterfall, agile, or any other framework, Product Quality is very crucial and imposes multiple risks if quality checks are not efficient enough.
Today's world is about customer-centric engineering and that means whatever we develop, Customers are driving it directly or indirectly and it is critical to build and maintain customer's "Trust" throughout for any business to be successful. We already are aware of how a single failure can bring numbers down. The day we heard rumors about security concerns with Zoom, we stopped using it or using it very carefully. What's important is it to understand how important is to maintain customer's trust and deliver a high-quality product each and every time.
What exactly do we need to deliver a high-quality product? There are multiple tools and processes but "concurrent engineering" is one of the processes I discovered is very efficient and supports the goal of delivering high-quality products. What does it really mean to do concurrent engineering?
Concurrent engineering emphasizes on parallelizing of tasks. This is a concept wherein quality engineers are involved right from the planning of the product. They work with the team during planning, design, development as well along with testing. They can review designs and influence design changes from a quality perspective. For that, they need to collect user experience information and evaluate the product from the user perspective. Finding testing challanges much before in the SDLC goes a long way and can impact product designs and delivery estimates. Evaluating the impact on cross-functional teams and estimating time for testing those products brings your estimates close to reality. Test planning is done in parallel to the development and reduces risks of last-minute surprises.
Concurrent Engineering is a long term business strategy, with long term benefits to the business. Though initial implementation can be challenging, the competitive advantage means it is beneficial in the long term. It removes the need to have multiple designs and development reworks, by creating an environment for designing a product right the first time around. It ensures the product is testable in each increment and builds confidence for the team and stakeholders.
