In this competitive age, Software quality assurance is an inevitable part of the software product development industry. Every IT company performs various activities and follows various strategies to ensure the quality of their product.
Software quality is one of the pivotal aspects of a software development company. Software quality assurance starts from the beginning of a project, right from the analysis phase.
Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is defined as a well planned and systematic approach to evaluate the quality of software. It checks the adherence to software product standards, processes, and procedures. SQA includes the systematic process of assuring that standards and procedures are established and are followed throughout the software development life cycle and test cycle as well. The compliance of the built with agreed-upon standards and procedures is evaluated through process monitoring, product evaluation, project management etc.
The major reason of involving software quality testing in the process of software product developmentis to make sure that the final product built is as per the requirement specification and comply with the standards.
- Requirement analysis and definition
- Design architecture and description
- Coding and logic analysis
- Change and configuration management
- Testing and standard compliance
- Release management and Release Control
Different activities of Quality Assurance are the following:
- Maintaining the quality of the project as per the specifications and business requirements.
- Defect Prevention. And formal methods for other defect prevention techniques
- Defect Reduction
- Inspection, formal and informal reviews: Direct fault detection and removal without executing the project scenario.
- Testing the project for Failure observation and bug removal.
- Risk identification.
- Defect tracking techniques and methods
- Software fault tolerance.
- Concluding Remarks and maintaining reports.
Software quality assurance is concerned with building software products with required quality and maintaining the level of quality. Software processes are important paradigm in achieving the software quality. The software quality assurance (SQA) key process area of the capability maturity model (CMM) consists of activities for keeping track on adherence to the processes and specifications. The term SQA sometimes creates confusions with the quality management concepts. Software quality can be quantified into two major groups such as:
- Software functional quality: It basically shows how well the software product conforms to the basic design, based on functional requirements. The attribute can also be described as the fitness for purpose of a software
- Software structural quality: It reflects to how well the project meets the non-functional requirements such as usability, accessibility and security that helps in proper the delivery of the functional requirements. It basically defines the degree of correctness of the product.
The Structural quality of a product is defined by the analysis of the software inner structure and its source code. The reason for structural software quality analysis is to check the adherence of the product with the software architecture specification. It is carried out by the developer of the project. In contrast; functional quality is all about checking the functionality adherence with the requirements specification and is measured through software testing.
The major principles required for any software product for quality and business value fulfillment are Reliability, Efficiency, Security, Size and Maintainability.
