S60 Smartphone Quality Assurance: A Guide for Mobile Engineers and Developers

Chapter 7: Stumbling Blocks

The term ‘quality’, together with ways of improving it, was introduced in the previous chapter. In this chapter, the focus is on things that normally prevent manufacturers fom obtaining good product quality in terms of both time and errors. First, the focus is kept at a more general level, but later sections address in detail the potential stumbling blocks that may threaten the success of a S60-based phone program.

7.1 Stumbling Blocks General to All Projects

In any product program, despite of whether it is a software project, an embedded project or a pure hardware project, there are certain stumbling blocks that can cause increasees in the schedule and/or the budget.

These stumbling blocks can vary quite much depending on:

• the nature of the product
• the company manufacturing it
• possible suppliers in the supplier chain

The nature of the product itself can make it more liable to certain types of risk. For example, a program making an expensive and critical part for a space shuttle most probably focuses its risk analysis on defects, which can cause danger for the pilots. Therefore, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has created its own tool for risk analysis. This tool is probably the most highly developed risk analysis tool in the modern world and it is called the Space Architecture Failure Evaluation (SAFE) tool. It is a Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) tool, which addresses the physical risk of the space transportation system. ...