TechAbout - Concepts
6.1 Benefits
Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is an umbrella term that refers to various methods and processes for testing software and ensuring its quality. QA is crucial when it comes to delivering great software.
- Saves money
- Prevents catastrophic corporate emergencies
- Inspires client confidence
- Maintains a great user experience
- Increases profit
- Boosts customer satisfaction
- Promotes organization, productivity, and efficiency
6.2 Roles
An SQA team acts as an advisory and monitoring group to aid Project Teams, Acceptance Test Teams, and SQA Teams in providing proper SQA at TechAbout.
- The Project Team consists of individuals responsible for project activities. They are tasked with delivering the final system and managing all associated documentation created during the project’s life cycle.
- The Acceptance Test Team is responsible for creating, executing, and documenting the Acceptance Test Plan.
The SQA Team focuses on activities related to software quality assurance and manages the associated documentation.
Software is tested for ease of use, handling of bad data, response to power outages, and performance under heavy user loads. During this phase of development, test engineers attempt to "break" the software in various ways and report their findings back to the development team.
6.3 Strategy
An SQA strategy consists of a basic set of procedures and activities designed to emphasize software quality at TechAbout.
Figure 1 illustrates the minimum set of eight elements necessary to define the project and SQA activities and to provide defect analysis as a means of continuous quality improvement.
Figure 1: Software Quality Strategy
6.4 Management Support
Management plays a crucial role in the level of success that an SQA Team can achieve on a project. Effective SQA requires effective management. Management supports SQA by:
- Supporting the consistent use of SQA principles by all involved
- Understanding software engineering and SQA methods
- Communicating well-defined requirements to SQA team members to achieve quality
- Recognizing the level of commitment required for SQA to be successful
6.5 Software Metrics
Software metrics involve the process of measuring software quality. The goal is to show the correlation between software engineering methods and improved software quality. The long-term objective is to understand how different SQA procedures and structured development methods impact overall software quality. By collecting metrics data, improvements in quality can be measured. Quality metrics are essential because it is difficult to manage and improve what is not measured.