Each time an organization develops a product, they have to write out a full set of specifications to avoid problems such as feature creep. Projects that don’t have clearly defined goals have a tendency to quickly grow out of proportion. That’s why many teams are turning to dedicated software solutions that help them keep track of their spec sheets.
Managing Project Expectations with a Digital Tool
Compliance is the number one concern of most teams that roll out a software package designed to help them with specifications management. Since these programs hold a record of all of the original requirements of any product they’re ordered to track, users will know right away if something doesn’t comply with the original goals. Engineers who are working on anything that has to adhere to certain regulatory guidelines will immediately spot any inconsistencies. This gives them an ample amount of time to fix problems long before anything goes to market.
By working with a specification management software package, technical teams can also spot serious errors that would have turned into showstopper bugs the moment a product hit the street. Sophisticated specification management clients will actively search for anything that seems to go against the overall design ethos of a particular project. If there’s anything that seems dramatically out of place, quality assurance agents will receive a report in their dashboard.
The fact that this dashboard even exists is another reason that packages developed using spec management programs tend to have fewer problems associated with them. There’s never any disagreement on where they should be getting their information from.
Working with a Single Source of Truth
All of this boils down to a greater level of communication between representatives of different departments coupled with a decrease in the amount of misinformation shared by coworkers. If technicians aren’t sure about the right way to do something, then they can simply check the spec management dashboard and find out the right way to proceed. Checklists were the traditional tools for handling this. Whenever someone made an adjustment to some process, they’d sign off on a spreadsheet that provided a constantly updated list of changes.
Eventually, people would lose access to the original spreadsheet so they’d end up managing their own list. Medium-sized and large organizations often ended up with several different checklist documents that all made differing claims about the current quality of the project that they were working on. Specification software offers a single properties sheet that everyone has at least limited write access to.
Individuals normally can’t edit fields set aside for other users, so there’s no real risk of inadvertent data loss. Quality control features built into this kind of software will generally send out a warning when someone makes an edit that doesn’t appear to make any sense. Administrators will be able to trace down the source of any change that doesn’t comply with the original list of best practices. They can then ultimately neutralize it if need be.
Distribution of Quality Assurance Resources
Perhaps no other segment of the market demonstrates the power of specifications managers as much as the open-source community has. The reason that open-source projects are so often free of major bugs is that so many people are constantly reviewing their code. As the number of programmers reviewing the underlying source code increases, the incidence of defects should go down. While it’s doubtful that many private organizations are going to suddenly switch to this kind of development model, they can still spread out their efforts over a large geographical area by connecting their spec authoring program to a network.
Remote workers in nearly any location would be able to test a product using this kind of technology. Whenever they find a bug, they can lodge a support ticket in a virtual database that keeps track of what problems people have run into. Though it might take some getting used to, this kind of collaboration is likely going to be one of the biggest uses of specification management applications in the near future.
As an increasingly large percentage of companies incorporate quality control software into their regular workflows, it’s likely that fewer bugs will make it out into the wild. That’s beneficial not only because it helps reduce costs for manufacturers but also because it means customers won’t have to deal with anywhere near as many defects.
