Software Quality

Chapter 24Templates and Checklists

24.1 Introduction

The task of preparing a report is always time-consuming, and despite investing time and thought into the process, you may often find yourself troubled with deliberations about the completeness and structure of the result, the “product.” An improvised solution to these structure and completeness difficulties is to scan old reports in order to apply their table of contents to the current report. Furthermore, you may find out that you need past reports on which to base your arguments. Unfortunately, only half of these may be available, and it is most often that the most important ones are missing. Once you finish your report, you may wish to look at the questions asked in last year's report's discussion. Again, frustration, the management clerks could not find the minutes of that meeting.

Software development and maintenance processes involve the production and use of a multitude of documents. Two simple SQA tools, templates and checklists, could support the preparation of documents. In addition to time savings, these tools improve the quality of reports including their structures (contributed by templates), and also provide better preparation for debate on reports by improving them according to checklists, and by preparing responses to the checklist topics.

The contribution of templates and checklists and the organizational framework for implementing these SQA tools are the topics discussed in the sections of this chapter: ...