Quality assurance is thus an indispensable part of any serious rapid-development program.
Half of the challenge of rapid development is avoiding disaster, and that is an area in which standard software-engineering principles excel.
Bill Hetzel found that strong measurement and tracking of project status was evident in every "best project." Status measurement to support project management appears as a natural by-product of the good planning work and is a critical success factor.
Be aware of the classic mistakes. Create lists of "worst practices" to avoid on future projects. Start with the list in this chapter. Add to the list by conducting project postmortems to learn from your team's mistakes. Encourage other projects within your organization to conduct postmortems so that you can learn from their mistakes. Exchange war stories with your colleagues in other organizations, and learn from their experiences. Display your list of mistake s prominently so that people will see it and learn not to make the same mistakes yet another time.
To summarize: analyze your project to determin which of the four dimensions are limited and wich you can leverage to maximum advantage. Then stretch each to the utmost. That in a nutshell, is the key to successful rapid development.
If you are serious about rapid development, you have to be serious about peopleware issues. Taken collectively, peopleware issues matter more than process, product, or technology. You have to address them if you want to succeed.
Quality assurance is thus an indispensable part of any serious rapid-development program.