GOST brings a holistic approach of software quality by extending and generalizing the notion of testing to the field of organizations and processes in addition to and beyond source code and architectures. This concept allows to consider activities of any kind as value flows to focus them on the same target: clients and business, knowing the first clients are employees.
GOST puts both the in-depth, abstract knowledge of testing through all its forms and field-tested software design methods at the service of a frequent value delivery, by linking rationalization, coordination and software crafts against chaos and entropy, at the strategic, tactical and operational levels.
GOST has been emerging by experimenting and learning good practices on the spot. GOST still results from continuous innovation and discovery, and battle-proven abilities. So it is thought and made to deal with quality matters in digital and agile transformations that all need to be sustained by engineering excellence.
When testing is extended beyond software, organizations become laboratories for experiments and processes the memory of lessons learnt. Fixe organizations and processes before source code and architectures.
Less Quality Control, more Quality Assurance: let us spend more time and energy to prevent defects from appearing than to identify and fix them.
The same paradigm must be adopted for all matters: management, designing, coding, testing, delivery. GOST is fully aligned with the adaptative paradigm to apply it for all matters, at any scale. That is to say:
- Processes are cyclic and iterative rather than linear and sequential.
- Activities are led simultaneously rather than executed in ordered steps.
- Delivering ready-to-consume services for someone else is the universal value while closing a cycle before starting a new one.
- Feedbacks come many times in multi-level, nested loops rather than once at the very end.
- Continuous improvement is the rule in all things.