Any product’s quality is as good as it’s quality of checkpoints. More and stringent the checkpoints, better the quality. When we bring software into this picture, Quality Checkpoints can be directly associated with various Software Engineering phases like Product Requirement Analysis, Engineering Requirements Specifications, Architecture, Design, Coding, Unit testing, Functional testing, Component testing, Integration testing, System testing, Acceptance testing etc. While you can achieve best quality with more and longer checkpoints, in this fast changing world you cannot have endless number of checkpoints or checkpoints which are longer. Each checkpoint has a different quality aspect to it. So it doesn’t make much sense to club multiple checkpoints into one or to reduce the number of checkpoints. To reduce the overall software development cycle and to achieve the best quality, focus has to be from two angles: Thorough search for flaws in early cycles, a...