Software Quality Assurance

Preface

This book addresses the global challenge of the improvement of software quality. It seeks to provide an overview of software quality assurance (SQA) practices for customers, managers, auditors, suppliers, and personnel responsible for software projects, development, maintenance, and software services.

In a globally competitive environment, clients and competitors exert a great deal of pressure on organizations. Clients are increasingly demanding and require, among other things, software that is of high quality, low cost, delivered quickly, and with impeccable after-sales support. To meet the demand, quality, and deadlines, the organization must use efficient quality assurance practices for their software activities.

Ensuring software quality is not an easy task. Standards define ways to maximize performance but managers and employees are largely left to themselves to decide how to practically improve the situation. They face several problems:

• – increasing pressure to deliver quality products quickly;
• – increasing size and complexity of software and of systems;
• – increasing requirements to meet national, international, and professional standards;
• – subcontracting and outsourcing;
• – distributed work teams; and
• – ever changing platforms and technologies.

We will focus on the issue of SQA in industry and in public organizations. Industry and public organizations do not have access to a complete and integrated reference (i.e., one book) that can help them with assessing ...