What Is Software Quality Assurance?

Software quality assurance is to establish a set of planned and systematic methods to assure management that the standards, procedures, practices, and methods that have been developed can be correctly adopted by all projects. The purpose of software quality assurance is to make software processes visible to managers. It verifies that software is standard by reviewing and auditing software products and activities. The software quality assurance team is involved in establishing plans, standards, and processes at the beginning of the project. These will enable the software project to meet the requirements of the institutional policy.

The focus of software quality assurance is to avoid defects in the first place. The main goals of quality assurance are:

(1) Ex ante prevention work, for example, focuses on defect prevention rather than defect inspection.

(2) Try to catch the defect as soon as it is introduced, rather than let the defect spread to the next stage.

(3) It acts on the process rather than the final product, so it may have a wide range of impacts and huge benefits.

(4) Run through all activities, not just focus on one point. ^[1]

The goal of software quality assurance is to monitor the execution of software development tasks from the perspective of a third party in an independent review manner, and to provide developers and management with product and process quality information on whether the software project correctly follows established plans, standards, and procedures Information and data to improve project transparency and assist software engineering in obtaining high-quality software products.

The main role of software quality assurance is to provide managers with a guarantee of predefined software processes. Therefore, the SQA organization must ensure the realization of the following: selected development methods are adopted, selected standards and procedures are adopted and followed, and independent Review, deviation from standards and procedures are timely reflected and handled, and each software task defined by the project is actually implemented.

The main tasks of software quality assurance are the following three aspects:

(1) SQA audit and review. SQA audits include software work products,

Software quality assurance is an important content of software engineering management. Software quality assurance mainly includes the following measures.

1) Apply good technical methods

Quality control activities must be implemented throughout the development process. Software developers should rely on appropriate technical methods and tools to form high-quality specifications and high-quality designs, and also select the appropriate software development environment for software development.

2) Test software

Five steps for software quality assurance implementation:

(1) Goal. Based on user requirements and development tasks, the quality characteristics of quality requirements criteria and quality design criteria are set to set quality targets for evaluation.

(2) Plan. Set the evaluation and inspection items suitable for the software to be developed. Generally, 20-30 are set.

(3) Implementation. Under the guidance of development standards and quality evaluation guidelines, produce high-quality specifications and procedures.

(4) Inspection. The evaluation is performed according to the quality evaluation criteria set in the planning stage, the score is calculated, and it is displayed in the form of a graph. The quality score and the quality target of the evaluation result are compared to determine whether it is qualified.

(5) Improvement. Improve the problems found in the evaluation and repeat the planning to improvement process until the development project is completed. ^[1]