Computers as Components, 3rd Edition

7.6 Quality Assurance

The quality of a product or service can be judged by how well it satisfies its intended function. A product can be of low quality for several reasons, such as it was shoddily manufactured, its components were improperly designed, its architecture was poorly conceived, and the product’s requirements were poorly understood. Quality must be designed in. You can’t test out enough bugs to deliver a high-quality product. The quality assurance (QA) process is vital for the delivery of a satisfactory system. In this section we will concentrate on portions of the methodology particularly aimed at improving the quality of the resulting system.

The software testing techniques described earlier in the book constitute one component of ...