With increased forms of competition and globalization many firms are adopting a greater emphasis on quality in today's business environment. But what is quality ? Quality can be defined as ensuring that goods and services perform as expected without failure or complications along the way.
- Importance of quality assurance
- Ensures that customers are kept satisfied as they get what they desire.
- Saves costs associated with wastage, replacement, etc.
- Improves the company's corporate image.
ISO standards
ISO (international standards organization ) standards are a set of internationally accepted standards which define both general (all types of goods) and specific (for specific types of goods and services) standards. The main benefit of complying with such standards is the recognition brought about by complying with such standards. ( ie : a firm following ISO guidelines is more likely to be selected by a client than one which doesn't.) ISO has specific guidelines for the iT industry as well. General standards include the ISO 9002 certification, etc.Software Quality
Software quality is one of the main concerns of the software developers.
What is software quallty?
There rs no simpie answer to this question. ln fact the answer may depenC on who is answering it. Different people have different views/perspectives of the software quality. For example users' perspective of software quality is different from software engineers perspective. What is more, different groups of software engineers also may have different views" Some aspects of software are more important to programmei's than to nraintenance enErneers and managers.
Achieving a high level of product or service quality is now the objective, If the n'lost organizations" lt is no longer acceptable to deliver poor quality products and then repair problems and defects after they have been delivered to the customer.
The responsibility of quality managers is to ensure that the required level of quality is achieved. Quality management involves defining appropriate procedures and standards and checking that these are followed by all engineers. It depends on developing a 'quality culture' where every one responsible for product development is committed to quality.
Quality management is not just concerned with ensuring that software is developed without faults and informs to its specification. It is also concerned with broader aspects of software quality such as security', reliability, robustness understand ability, test-ability, portability, usability, re-usability, efficiency and so on.
A critical part of quality planning is selecting critical quality attributes and planning how these can be achieved.
Software quality managers are responsible for three kinds of activities:
- Quality assurance: They must establish organizational procedures and standards which lead to high quality software.
- Quality planning: They must select appropriate procedures and standards and tailor them for a specific software project.
- Quality control: They must ensure that procedures and standards are followed by the development team.
Quality assurance is concerned with defining how an organization aims to achieve quality. lt involves defining or selecting standards that should be applied to the software development process or software product.
Quality control involves overseeing the software development process to ensure that quality assurance procedures and standards are being followed. The quality control process has its own set of procedures and reports that must be defined and applied during the development process. As far as possible these procedures should be straight forward and easily understood by the engineers developing the software.
Quality plan should begin at an early stage in the software process. A quality plan should set out the desired product qualities. It should set out how these are to be assessed" therefore sets out what high quality software actually means. Without such a definition, different engineers may work in an opposing way so that different product attributes are optimized.
Quality Reviews
Reviews are the principal method of validating the quality of a process or product.'They involve a group of people examining part or all of a software process. system or lts associate documentation to discover potential problems. There are two broad classes of review:
- lnspectron
- Walkthroughs
The main difference between inspection and walkthroughs is the way review meeting are carried out.
In a walkthrough. the team uses pre-selected analyzed program (code design etc.)
ln an inspection, the team uses a checklist of faults/errors to occur in the analyzed program (code, design etc) This list advance. determine whether they should be prepared in
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