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.
Software Quality Fundamentals
Agreement on quality requirements, as well as clear communication to the software engineer on what constitutes quality, require that the many aspects of quality be formally defined and discussed.
A software engineer should understand the underlying meanings of quality concepts and characteristics and their value to the software under development or to maintenance.
The important concept is that the software requirements define the required quality characteristics of the software and influence the measurement methods and acceptance criteria for assessing these characteristics.