Details of Software Quality Assurance

SQA is an activity that is applied throughout the software engineering process.

·         Analysis, design, coding and testing methods and tools

·         Formal technical reviews that are applied during each development step

·         A multi-tiered testing strategy

·         Control of software documentation and the changes made to it .

·         A procedure to assure compliance with software development standards (when applicable)

·         A measurement and reporting mechanisms

Software Quality Techniques

·         Software Quality Assurance is a systematic program of activities designed to ensure that   a system has the desired characteristics.

·          It is generally better to focus on the process of software development then on the product itself.

Software Quality Objectives

·         Quality is often perceived as a secondary goal.

·         Software producing organizations must show programmers that quality is a priority.

·         Making quality-assurance an independent activity makes the priority clear.

·         Formal and informal reviews can be used as quality gates, periodic tests  that  determine whether the quality of the product is sufficient to justify moving to the next stage of development.

  Testing Strategy

·         This is often the primary method for both quality assessment and improvement.

·         Testing is important but it is often given too much emphasis and it is often the only method of quality assurance.

  External Audits

·         Auditors are brought from outside the organization and reports to whoever commissioned the audit it might not be explicitly a quality assurance activity for example is the process for risk management techniques.

The Principle of SQ

·         The best way to improve productivity and quality is to reduce the time spent reworking code. Reworking can take the form of changes in requirements, changes in design, or debugging.

·         A study done by NASA's Software Engineering Laboratory examined 50 development projects involving over 400 work-years of effort and almost 3 million lines of code supported this finding.   Increased quality assurance was associated with decreased error rates but no change in overall development cost.

                       

Thanks & Regards
Pankaj Sharma