QCT Trade-offs

A trade-off is a concept of losing a value for gaining another. The Quality Cost Time Concept should have a tradeoff to serve company goals.

Owning the customer satisfaction is the key of quality procedures, we mean here an internal or external customer, by breaking few of these procedures we may serve the tradeoff between cost, time, and quality. The concepts of software engineering and system development models like the waterfall model or the spiral model, etc serve in few times this tradeoff. Starting with requirement elicitation that takes a considerable timeframe in a product development lifecycle, to design step, to implementation, then validation and verification. This lifecycle confirms the quality concept, but may not help the time and cost variables, and here we need the tradeoff.

Nothing do everything, here is a concept of specialization. And here it can be easier for shareholders, stakeholders, and customers to understand the tradeoff equations. The three equations of the variables Q,C, and T can be solved if we understand the dependencies of the variables as functions of different factors and its relations to each other.

We don’t need to make such discussion as a mathematical article, but we should understand that quality can be transferred into a constant if we deal with the cost and time variables. Away from saturation and low productivity levels, Time is inversely proportional to Cost, pay more or get more resources you can save time, getting more resources will logically and to some limit increase the quality. If we specialize the product not to be all purpose losing many quality concepts, if we distribute the resources in a mature way, if every resource is evaluated enough; then no need for tradeoffs. But if a QCT tradeoff is needed under the request of the customer, it will directly affect one, two , or all factors in the QCT concept.