Mumbai University > Information Technology > Sem6 > Software Engineering

Marks: 10M

Year: Dec 2015

Software Quality Assurance

• Software quality assurance (SQA) is a process that ensures that developed software meets and complies with defined or standardized quality specifications.
• SQA is an ongoing process within the software development life cycle (SDLC) that routinely checks the developed software to ensure it meets desired quality measures.

• Rather than checking for quality after completion, SQA processes tests for quality in each phase of development until the software is complete. With SQA, the software development process moves into the next phase only once the current/previous phase complies with the required quality standards.

• SQA generally works on one or more industry standards that help in building software quality guidelines and implementation strategies. These standards include the ISO 9000 and capability maturity model integration (CMMI).

SQA Activities:

• Software quality assurance is composed of a variety of tasks associated with two different constituencies – the software engineers who do technical work and an SQA group that has responsibility for quality assurance planning, record keeping, analysis and reporting.

• Following activities are performed by an independent SQA group:

  1. Prepares an SQA plan for a project: The plan is developed during project planning and is reviewed by all stakeholders. Quality assurance activities performed by the software engineering team and the SQA group are governed by the plan. The plan identifies evaluations to be performed, audits and reviews to be performed, standards that are applicable to the project, procedures for error reporting and tracking, documents to be produced by the SQA team, and amount of feedback provided to the software project team.

  2. Participates in the development of the project’s software process description: The software team selects a process for the work to be performed. The SQA group reviews the process description for compliance with organizational policy, internal software standards, externally imposed standards (eg. ISO-9001), and other parts of software project plan.

  3. Reviews software engineering activities to verify compliance with the defined software process: The SQA group identifies, documents, and tracks deviations from the process and verifies that corrections have been made.

  4. Audits designated software work products to verify compliance with those defined as a part of the software process : The SQA group reviews selected work products, identifies, documents and tracks deviations, verifies that corrections have been made, and periodically reports the results of its work to the project manager.

  5. Ensures that deviations in software work and work products are documented and handled according to a documented procedure: Deviations may be encountered in the project plan, process description, applicable standards, or technical work products.

  6. Records any noncompliance and reports to senior management: Non- compliance items are tracked until they are resolved.

Goals and Objectives of SQA:

Software Quality Assurance was created with the following objectives:

• Small to Zero Defects after Installation – One of the biggest goals of SQA is to prevent any possible defects when the output is made. Developers and engineers have to use universally approved steps to ensure that the program was built up to expectations but also to prevent errors in the system. Although some standards allow as much as .04 errors in the system, zero-error is still the system’s target. When there’s zero-error, the program is more likely to have zero crash scenarios. The ability to handle stress of a program is different from the errors it has but crashes usually comes from defects so prevention of defects will most likely yield a continuously working application.

• Customer Satisfaction – Everything else will be just nothing if the customers don’t like what they see. Part of SQA is to ensure that software development was made according to their needs, wants and exceeding their expectations. Even if the bugs and errors are minimized by the system, customer satisfaction is more important and should be emphasized.

• Well Structured – SQA takes care of the stages of application construction. Anyone could be easily build an application and launch it in their environment without any glitches. However, not everyone could easily build an application that could be understood well. SQA ensures that each application are built in an understandable manner. Their applications could easily be transferred from one developer to another.