Software Quality Assurance

Software Quality Assurance

Software Quality Assurance is an planned and systematic activity which consist of the methods and procedures that ensures the quality of the software throughout the software process. Software Assurance assures that the software and its related products meet their specified requirements, conform to standards and regulations, are consistent, complete, correct, safe and secure for the system and operating environment, and satisfy the customer needs.

In short, the purpose of the software quality assurance is to assure that the software products are of high quality and operate safely to provide management with appropriate visibility into the process being used by the software project being developed.

Software Assurance consist of the following desciplines:-

* Software Quality

 Software Quality Assurance

 Software Quality Control

 Software Quality Engineering

* Software Safety

* Software Reliability

* Software Verification and Validation

* Independent Verification and Validation

Objectives of Software Quality Assurance :-

Software Quality Assurance can be applied to increase the effectiveness of both management and the software developers. The objective of the SQA is to assure sufficient planning, reporting and control to affect the development of software products which meet the contractual requirements.

* Provide appropriate training:- In order to improve the quality of the software product, the manager of an organization must budget for and provide training in software engineering, including testing techniques and SQA. Not only must the manager budget for the cost of the training classes, in addition, the manager must take into account and "budget" for the time the employee will be in training. The training must be scheduled within the constraints of the project requirements, but it, nevertheless, must be scheduled.

* Provide appropriate tools for the developers:- Management can budget for and provide tools for the developers. The manager must provide for training in the use of the tools. Tools inherently are designed to make a task easier; therefore, pay-off in this area would be straight forward to measure by increased productivity. Increased use of both software engineering techniques and tools will show that productivity will increases up to 75% over an entire software life cycle.

* Plan for quality. Quality requirements should be defined as a part of the overall requirements. Mean-time between-failures and down-time are