Chapter 16

 Software Quality Assurance

Slide Set to accompany
Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 7/e
by Roger S. Pressman

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These slides are designed to accompany Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 7/e
(McGraw-Hill 2009). Slides copyright 2009 by Roger Pressman. 1
Elements of SQA
 Standards
 Reviews and Audits
 Testing
 Error/defect collection and analysis
 Change management
 Education
 Vendor management
 Security management
 Safety
 Risk management

These slides are designed to accompany Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 7/e
(McGraw-Hill 2009). Slides copyright 2009 by Roger Pressman. 2
 Quality Concepts - 1

 Variation control is the heart of quality

control
 Software engineers strive to control the
 process applied

 resources expended

 end product quality attributes

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Quality Concepts - 2
 Quality of conformance
 degree to which design specifications are followed
in manufacturing the product
 Quality control
 series of inspections, reviews, and tests used to
ensure conformance of a work product to its
specifications
 Quality assurance
 auditing and reporting procedures used to provide
management with data needed to make proactive
decisions

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 Role of the SQA Group-I
 Prepares an SQA plan for a project.
 The plan identifies
• evaluations to be performed
• audits and reviews to be performed
• standards that are applicable to the project
• procedures for error reporting and tracking
• documents to be produced by the SQA group
• amount of feedback provided to the software project
team
 Participates in the development of the project’s
software life-cycle.
 The SQA group reviews software process description for
compliance with organizational policy, internal software
standards, externally imposed standards (e.g., ISO-9001),
and other parts of the software project plan.
These slides are designed to accompany Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 7/e
(McGraw-Hill 2009). Slides copyright 2009 by Roger Pressman. 5
Role of the SQA Group-II
 Reviews software engineering activities to verify
compliance with the defined software process.
 identifies, documents, and tracks deviations from the
process and verifies that corrections have been made.
 Audits designated software work products to verify
compliance with those defined as part of the
software process.
 reviews selected work products; identifies, documents, and
tracks deviations; verifies that corrections have been made
 periodically reports the results of its work to the project
manager.
 Ensures that deviations in software work and work
products are documented and handled according to
a documented procedure.
 Records any noncompliance and reports to senior
management.
 Noncompliance items are tracked until they are resolved.

These slides are designed to accompany Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 7/e
(McGraw-Hill 2009). Slides copyright 2009 by Roger Pressman. 6
SQA Goals
 Requirements quality. The correctness, completeness, and
consistency of the requirements model will have a strong
influence on the quality of all work products that follow.
 Design quality. Every element of the design model should
be assessed by the software team to ensure that it exhibits
high quality and that the design itself conforms to
requirements.
 Code quality. Source code and related work products
(e.g., other descriptive information) must conform to local
coding standards and exhibit characteristics that will
facilitate maintainability.
 Quality control effectiveness. A software team should
apply limited resources in a way that has the highest
likelihood of achieving a high quality result.

These slides are designed to accompany Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 7/e
(McGraw-Hill 2009). Slides copyright 2009 by Roger Pressman. 7
Statistical SQA
Product Collect information on all defects
Find the causes of the defects
& Process Move to provide fixes for the process

measurement

... an understanding of how

to improve quality ...

These slides are designed to accompany Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 7/e
(McGraw-Hill 2009). Slides copyright 2009 by Roger Pressman. 8
 Software Reliability
 A simple measure of reliability is mean-time-
between-failure (MTBF), where
MTBF = MTTF + MTTR
 MTTF is mean-time-to-failure
 MTTR is mean-time-to-repair

 Software availability is the probability that a

program is operating according to requirements
at a given point in time and is defined as
Availability = [MTTF/(MTTF + MTTR)] x 100%

These slides are designed to accompany Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 7/e
(McGraw-Hill 2009). Slides copyright 2009 by Roger Pressman. 10
 Software Safety
 Software safety is a software quality
assurance activity that focuses on the
identification and assessment of potential
hazards that may affect software negatively
and cause an entire system to fail.
 If hazards can be identified early in the
software process, software design features
can be specified that will either eliminate or
control potential hazards.

These slides are designed to accompany Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 7/e
(McGraw-Hill 2009). Slides copyright 2009 by Roger Pressman. 11
 ISO 9001:2000 Standard
 ISO 9001:2000 is the quality assurance standard that
applies to software engineering.
 The standard contains 20 requirements that must be
present for an effective quality assurance system.
 The requirements delineated by ISO 9001:2000 address
topics such as
 management responsibility, quality system, contract review,
design control, document and data control, product identification
and traceability, process control, inspection and testing, corrective
and preventive action, control of quality records, internal quality
audits, training, servicing, and statistical techniques.

These slides are designed to accompany Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 7/e
(McGraw-Hill 2009). Slides copyright 2009 by Roger Pressman. 12
Typical Structure for
SQA Unit

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