Software Quality

Engineering
(SEC-3073)
Fall 2021

Dr. Toqeer Mahmood

SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING
 Software Quality Engineering / Assurance: is a set of
activities for ensuring quality in software engineering
processes (that ultimately result in the quality of software
products).
 SQA Activities
◦ Process definition and implementation
◦ Auditing
◦ Training
 SQA Processes
◦ Software Development Methodology
◦ Project Management
◦ Requirements Management
◦ Estimation
◦ Software Design
◦ Testing, etc.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING

 Quality
 Quality Engineering
 Quality Types
 Quality Control vs Quality Assurance
 Different views of Quality
 Quality Models
 Cost of Quality
SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING
WHAT IS QUALITY?
 Quality, simplistically, means that a product
should meet its specification.
 Quality is problematical for software systems:
◦ There is a tension between customer quality
requirements (efficiency, reliability, etc.) and developer
quality requirements (maintainability, reusability, etc.);
◦ Some quality requirements are difficult to specify in an
unambiguous way;
◦ Software specifications are usually incomplete and often
inconsistent.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING
WHAT IS QUALITY?
SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING
QUALITY ENGINEERING?
 Software quality assurance (SQA) refers to
the means of monitoring the software
engineering processes and methods used to ensure
quality of the product.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING
QUALITY ENGINEERING?
 Software quality assurance: demands to focus
on the following key issues:
◦ Perfection
◦ Consistency
◦ Eliminating waste
◦ Speed of delivery
◦ Compliance with policies & procedures
◦ Providing good usable products
◦ Doing it right the first time
◦ Delighting or pleasing customers
◦ Total customer service & satisfaction
SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING
QUALITY TYPES?
 Functional Quality – a measure of what the
software does vs. what it’s supposed to do.

 Non-Functional Quality – a measure of how

well it does vs. how well it’s supposed to do it.

 Latent Quality – a measure of how well it will

continue to do it in the future.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING
QUALITY TYPES?
 Process quality
◦ Software processes implement best practices of software
engineering in an organizational context.
◦ Software process quality expresses the degree to which
defined processes were followed and completed.
 Product quality
◦ Software products are the output of software processes.
◦ Product quality is determined by the degree to which the
developed software meets the defined requirements.
 Quality in use
◦ Quality in use addresses the degree to which a product is
fit for the purpose when exposed to a particular context
of use.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE
DIFFERENT VIEWS OF QUALITY?
 Transcendental View
(Excellence)
 User View
(Fitness for purpose)
 Manufacturing View
(Conformance to requirements)
 Product View
(You get what you pay for)
 Value based View
(Engineer to price)
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE
DIFFERENT VIEWS OF QUALITY?
 Transcendental View (Excellence)
◦ Quality is something that can be recognized but it is very
difficult to define.
◦ Here we can say that the quality is something that can be
recognized through experience but is not defined in
some manageable form.
 User View (Fitness for purpose)
◦ According to this view, while evaluating the quality of
the product, one must ask the key question:
"Does the product satisfy user needs and expectations?"
◦ It can thus be a highly personalized view. This view is
often measured by reliability, usability.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE
DIFFERENT VIEWS OF QUALITY?
 Manufacturing View (Conformance to requirements)
◦ It focuses on how well the product was manufactured or
constructed, in an effort to avoid the costs associated with
rework during development and after delivery.
◦ Defect counts and rework costs are two characteristics to
measure.
 Product View (You get what you pay for)
◦ In this case, quality is viewed as tied to the inherent
characteristics of the product. A product's internal qualities
determine its external qualities.
◦ Example: Product view of software quality is the high degree
of modularity, which is an internal property that makes a
software testable and maintainable.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE
DIFFERENT VIEWS OF QUALITY?
 Value based View (Engineer to price)
◦ Quality depends on the amount, the customer is willing
to pay for it.
◦ Software quality is customer satisfaction. Indeed
customer satisfaction should be a result of delivering a
quality product, but satisfaction can be influenced by
many things and is not the same as quality.
◦ Moreover, customers routinely are satisfied by poor
quality and not satisfied by high quality.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE
QUALITY MODELS?
 Standard quality models
◦ McCall,
◦ ISO/IEC 9126,
◦ etc…
 Application or company specific quality models
◦ FURPS
◦ GQM Approach
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE

 Cost of Quality
◦ Prevention cost
◦ Appraisal cost or Inspection cost
◦ Failure cost
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE
COST OF QUALITY
 Prevention cost
◦ It is much better to prevent defects rather than finding
and removing them from the products.
◦ The costs incurred to avoid or minimize the number of
defects at first place are known as prevention costs.
◦ Examples:
improvements in development processes,
workers training,
quality engineering,
etc.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE
COST OF QUALITY
 Appraisal cost or Inspection cost
◦ The cost that is incurred to identify defective products
before they are shipped to customers.
◦ All costs associated with the activities that are
performed during manufacturing processes to ensure
required quality standards are also included in this
category.
◦ Identification of defective products involves
maintaining a team of inspectors.
◦ It may be very costly for some organizations.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE
COST OF QUALITY
 Failure cost
◦ Internal failure cost:
The costs that are incurred to remove defects from the
products before shipping them to customers.
◦ Examples: cost of rework, rejected products, scrap etc.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE
COST OF QUALITY
 Failure cost
◦ External failure cost:
If defective products have been shipped to customers,
external failure costs arise.
◦ The delivery of defective products results in
dissatisfaction of the customers, damage goodwill and
reduce sales and profits.
◦ Examples: reanalysis, redesign, redevelopment,
payment for damages arising from the use of defective
products etc.
QUALITY ASSURANCE

 Software Quality Assurance

 Dealing with Pre-Post Release Defects
 Classification Scheme for Quality Assurance
◦ Defect Reduction
◦ Defect Containment
◦ Defect prevention
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE

 “All planned & systematic activities implemented

within quality system, & demonstrated as needed,
to provide adequate confidence that an entity will
fulfill requirements for quality”.
DEALING WITH PRE-POST RELEASE DEFECTS

 Pre-release: defects are those that we face during

beta testing that are noted and rectified when a
new version of an application is near to
completion.
 Here, we try to find different types of failures and
defects such as:
◦ the average length of usage time before the occurrence
of the first failure,
◦ the spread of failures to the majority of users, and
◦ the daily rates of failures.
DEALING WITH PRE-POST RELEASE DEFECTS

 Post-release: defects are those that we face after

delivery of the final version of the software to the
end users.
◦ Failures/problems reported by customers and users also
need to be fixed, which in turn, could lead to reduced
defects and improved product quality.
CLASSIFICATION SCHEME FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE
 Defect Prevention

 Defect Reduction (Defect Detection and Removal)

 Defect Containment
CLASSIFICATION SCHEME FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE

 Defect Prevention
◦ Process conformance and standards enforcement
◦ Tools/technologies and techniques
◦ Education and training
CLASSIFICATION SCHEME FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE
 Defect Reduction (Defect Detection and Removal)
 Static Testing
◦ Static Testing is a type of testing in which the code is not
executed.
◦ This type of testing checks the code, requirement
documents, design documents and puts review
comments on the work document.
◦ It can be done on work documents like requirement
specifications, design documents, source code, test
plans, test scripts and test cases, web page content.
CLASSIFICATION SCHEME FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE
 Defect Reduction (Defect Detection and Removal)
 Dynamic Testing
◦ Dynamic testing is done when the code is in operation mode.
◦ Dynamic testing is performed in runtime environment. When
the code being executed is input with a value, the result or
the output of the code is checked and compared with the
expected output.
 Unit Testing: Testing of individual modules by developers. The
source code is tested in it.
 Integration Testing: Testing the interface between different modules
then they are joined.
 System Testing: Testing performed on the system as a whole.
 Acceptance Testing: Testing done from user point of view at user’s
end.
CLASSIFICATION SCHEME FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE

 Defect Containment
◦ Software Fault Tolerance
◦ Software fault tolerance is the ability for software to
detect and recover from a fault that is happening or has
already happened in either the software or hardware in
the system in which the software is running in order to
provide service in accordance with the specification.
◦ Fault Containment
◦ Fault containment to prevent propagation of the failure –
Some failures can cause a system to fail by propagating
the failure to the rest of the system.
SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE

 SQA Team
 SQA Plan
 Software Review
SQA TEAM

 SQA/Testing Manager
 SQA/Test Team Lead
 SQA/Test Analyst
 SQA/Tester
SQA PLAN

 The software quality assurance (SQA) plan is an

outline of quality measures to ensure quality
levels within a software development effort.
 The SQA plan is used to compare the actual levels
of quality during development with the planned
levels of quality.
 If the levels of quality are not within the planned
quality levels, management will respond
appropriately as documented within the plan.
SOFTWARE REVIEWS

 What is software review?

 Why software reviews?
SOFTWARE REVIEWS

 What is software review?

◦ A software review is a systematic examination of a
document by one or more people with the aim of
finding and removing errors early in the software
development life cycle (SDLC).
◦ Software Reviews are used to verify documents
such as requirements, system designs, code, test
plans, test cases etc.
SOFTWARE REVIEWS

 Why software reviews?

◦ The software reviews are performed to identify issues
at early stages and lowers the cost of rework than they
would be identified by testing team or by user reports
later on.