Recently I joined a small company as their test lead and we have been looking at ways to improve the quality of our products. It got me thinking about all the factors that influence quality. This blog will be about my observations and lessons learnt as we go about creating high quality products for our customers. Improving the quality of a product relies on so much more than just testing. It involves a diverse range of factors including the process we use to develop the product, how the software is designed and coded, and of course how it is tested. It is not possible to test quality into a product. Instead, quality must be considered right from the start. So what are some of the factors that influence quality? It all starts with requirements and how they are written. Do they make crystal clear to both the developers and the testers what is being created? We have found it very valuable to document high level customer requirements as user stories with acceptance criteria.