Question

Describe (150 to 180 words) the costs which could have an impact on the quality of documents.

Answer 1

There are three types of cost associated with the quality and quality documentation such as prevention, appraisal and failure costs. Prevention costs are mostly associated with fulfilling the customer requirements by providing defect free product and related documents. Prevention costs are generally emerged in the early stage of the process and includes training materials, design documents, review records, contract or supplier documents. Appraisal costs are experienced during the examining of the process or project or product, mostly test or inspection and related documents. Finally, the failure costs (also called as cost of poor quality) comes into picture when product or project does not deliver based on the plan. Failure costs consists of internal (corrective actions, rework etc.) and external failure (customer service costs etc). First one relates to the situation when the product is still with you, but requirements were not fulfilled whereas another one relates to the situation where product is released to the customer with bad quality product and documentation.

For example, if the user guide does not mention about the key features of the products as requested by customer or known issues with the product or known bugs with the software then this may cause the customer dissatisfaction.