Topics covered

What Quality means

Knowing about software quality
SQM includes
– Quality Assurance and standards
– Quality planning
– Quality control
 Software Quality
“Conformance to explicitly stated functional and
performance requirements, explicitly documented
development standards, and implicit characteristics that
are expected of all professionally developed software”.
The definition serves to emphasize three important points:
1. Software requirements are the foundation from which
quality is measured.
Lack of conformance to requirements is lack of quality.
2. Software standards and procedures define a set of
development criteria that guide the manner in which software is
engineered. If the criteria are not followed, lack of quality will
almost surely result.
 Software Quality
3.
There is a set of implicit requirements that often
goes unmentioned (e.g., the desire for good
maintainability).
If software conforms to its explicit requirements but
fails to meet implicit requirements, software quality is
suspect.
 What is quality?
Quality, simplistically, means that a product
should meet its specification.
Software specification includes time, cost and
other software requirements.
 Specifications should be (clearly) defined well
before the project starts.
 Is it possible???
 What is quality?
This is problematical for software systems
– Software specifications are usually incomplete and
often inconsistent.
– Some quality requirements are difficult to specify
in an unambiguous way;
– There is a tension between customer quality
requirements (efficiency, reliability, etc.) and
developer quality requirements (maintainability,
reusability, etc.);
 The quality compromise
We cannot wait for specifications to
improve before paying attention to
quality management.
We must put quality management
procedures into place to improve quality
in spite of imperfect specification.
 Quality Attributes
Generally the attributes are divided into these four categories:
1. Maintainability
It should be possible for the software to evolve to meet
changing requirements.
- flexibility (design for change)
- readability
2. Dependability
The software should not cause physical or economic damage in
the event of failure
- reliability - safety - security
 Quality Attributes
3. Efficiency
The software should not make wasteful use of system
resources

4. Usability
Software should have an appropriate user interface
and documentation
 Software Quality Factors
Operational characteristics
- correctness - does it do what I want?
- reliability - does it do it accurately?
- efficiency - will it run efficiently on my hardware?
- integrity - is it secure?
- usability - is it designed for the user?
Product revision
- maintainability - can I fix it?
- flexibility - can I change it?
- testability - can I test it?
 Software Quality Factors
Product transition
- portability - will I be able to use it on another
machine?
- reusability - will I be able to reuse some of the
software?
- interoperability - will I be able to interface it with
another system?
 Software quality management
Concerned with ensuring that the required level
of quality is achieved in a software product.
Involves defining appropriate quality standards
and procedures and ensuring that these are
followed.
Should aim to develop a ‘quality culture’ where
quality is seen as everyone’s responsibility.
 Quality management activities
Quality assurance
– Establish organisational procedures and standards for quality.
Quality planning
– Select applicable procedures and standards for a particular
project and modify these as required.
Quality control
– Ensure that procedures and standards are followed by the
software development team.
Quality management should be separate from project
management to ensure independence.
 Quality management and software development

Software development D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
process

Quality management
process

Standards and Quality Quality review repor

ts
procedures plan