START SOFTWARE OUR QUALITY SYSTEM

We want to have long-standing, profitable and happy relationships with our customers.  We pride ourselves on using tools and techniques which enable us to respond incredibly quickly to customer requests.  Sometimes, though, responding quickly means that there is pressure to short-cut testing and documentation. We have worked to achieve a number of internationally recognised Quality accreditations including ISO9001 and AccredIT.  The work "behind the scenes" to achieve these Quality Marks helps us to put the appropriate checks and balances into our processes to ensure that we get things right first time, as much as possible.

We have some Golden Rules in our business which help us to do the right thing for our customers in every transaction.  Here are some of the key rules:

• everything is checked before it reaches the customer
• we never do a short-term fix
• we think "fail safe" in everything we do
• half a job is no job at all
• if we make a promise we stick to it
• everything we do is documented.

We know that we are not perfect but this is what we aspire to - and we check our work daily against this list.

When we deliver a software change to a client, it has to go through checks and tests appropriate and proportionate to the change being delivered.  We understand that there is nothing more annoying than for us to break something (or appear to) as part of a software fix or improvement being delivered.

These checks might include:

• the design of the change being verified by another consultant
• the programming being checked by another coder
• the change itself being tested against the specification
• any documentation being updated.

Once we have verified that an appropriate level of checks has been delivered, the change is released. This process helps us to be confident that we are delivering quality software.