Software Quality Management
The notion of "quality" is not as simple as it may seem. For any engineered product, many desired qualities are relevant to a particular project. The section explains software quality fundamentals, including the main SQM processes: quality assurance, verification, validation, review, and audit. Software quality refers to the delivered product of a software development project, but that quality depends on the quality of the "upstream" products from which it was derived, including requirements, design, construction, and the software quality activities that support it during the development, namely, validation, verification, testing, and measurement. Software quality terminology is numerous, informal, formal, and often ambiguous, with multiple categorizations (internal, external, operational, and feature quality). All of this makes software quality interesting to study.
From a domain perspective, software quality applies to both the problem application domain and the solution domains. It applies to all software development activities and all software products. It is interdisciplinary in that it is a topic in management, software engineering, mathematics, statistics, measurement, and more. It intersects the generic categories of human, software, and hardware and refers to the evolving relationships of these generic types. This last observation hints at the next stage in the evolution of computing technology.
Software quality is a major driving factor for computing technology evolution, which is increasing our capabilities to solve complex problems better, faster, on a larger scale, and with more automation. Generally, the problem domain gets smaller as the solution domain gets larger. The solution domain gets larger as hardware and software support becomes automated. More automation often begins with new abstractions we make in the problem domain, resulting in new relationships between hardware and software, eventually manifesting as automated support tools. We give names to these tools: "cloud computing", big databases, programming languages (front-end, network, back-end, and so on), and AI (natural language translation, image recognition, and machine learning). Indeed, software quality is very interesting.
Reviews and Audits
For purposes of brevity, reviews and audits are treated as a single topic in this Guide, rather than as two separate topics as in (IEEE12207.0-96). The review and audit process is broadly defined in (IEEE12207.0-96) and in more detail in (IEEE1028-97). Five types of reviews or audits are presented in the IEEE1028-97 standard:
- Management reviews
- Technical reviews
- Inspections
- Walk-throughs
- Audits