Quality Assurance

It is a systematic and planned pattern of all procedures essential to provide enough assurance that the item or project matches to conventional technical requirements.

Software Quality Assurance (SQA)

It is an umbrella activity that is applied through the software process. It is essential as it decreases the amount of rework that it must do which results in lesser costs and more significantly, improved time to market. SQA, thus, lays significant stress on getting the design accurate, previous to coding, even though the increasing use of prototyping in systems development is dropping the differences amid the production phases of software and hardware. SQA must also:

•    Acquire a mathematical evidence of precision,
•    Provide for in-depth testing,
•    Persuade oneself that the productivity from each stage of the development process, which will be a dissimilar representation of the software, is functionally equal to its precursor.

Management Role in SQA

The failure of the management to suitably plan and control the software development process is now felt to have been accountable for much of the deprived quality software produced or developed in the earlier period. Actually, one of the main roadblocks in software quality was the conviction/attitude that problems can be sorted out at the end of the development process.

It is now in general acknowledged that management has a key role to take part in the production/development of Quality Software, as the SQA, akin to any other form of quality assurance, is extremely reliant upon management mind-set.

The management must manifest and send out greater desire to make high-class product. The management should also entrust ‘appropriate resources’ to ensure this. Consecutively, the software developers should plan and execute software development projects with the aim of “building in” quality.

SQA Activities

SQA is composed of a variety of tasks linked with 2 dissimilar constituencies: SQA group that has responsibility for quality assurance planning, record keeping, oversight, analysis and reporting and the other are software engineers, who do technical work. The character of a SQA group is to help the software team in attaining a high-class product.

The SQA group prepares a SQA plan that identifies:
•    Assessments to be carried out,
•    Reviews and audits to be executed,
•    Standards those are relevant to the project,
•    Measures for error reporting and tracking,
•    Credentials to be produced by the SQL group, and
•    Amount of feedback provided to the software project team.