Page 186 - SOFTWARE TESTING & QUALITY ASSURANCE

Unit 12: Software Quality Assurance

Role of the software tester
An effective tester needs to take personal responsibility for the bugs he/she finds, track
them through bug life cycle, and convince the software development team to fix it at
the earliest.

Quality Assurance
Software quality assurance guarantees that the principles, methods, and procedures are in place, and
are suitable for the project and can be implemented properly.

Did you know? Bell Labs in the year 1916 introduced formal quality assurance and control function for
the first time. This function was successfully implemented by different companies
throughout the world.
Software quality assurance involves different means of preventing occurrence of defects in the software
being developed. The various methods that are implemented to ensure the quality are ISO 9000 model
or CMM model. The aim of software quality assurance is to continuously improve a clearly defined
process and to control every step of the process.

The responsibility of the software quality assurance individual is to inspect and calculate the present
software development process and to discover ways to improve it with an intention of preventing the
occurrence of bugs. The responsibility and scope of a Software Quality Assurance group is larger than
the software testing group.

Consider a User interface standard that has no distinction between an "open
new window" and a "replace current window", in the “Go To” button.
During usability testing, it is discovered that, lack of distinction between the
“open new window" and a "replace current window", caused the end-user’s to
search for correct window.
The SQA team sends this information (usability metric) back to the user
interface designers and an alteration to the user interface standards are made.
As per the definition of assurance that is “a guarantee or pledge” or “a freedom from doubt,” a quality
assurance group’s role is to guarantee that the quality of the product is good. Quality Assurance (QA)
group is authorised to inspect the standards and methodologies followed in a software project. It also
monitors and evaluates the software development process to provide feedback solutions to the process
problems and performs the testing process to decide whether the product is ready for release in the
market.
Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is a common software measure that tracks
down how often the system fails to perform the given task. This measure, in
turn, helps to find out the reliability of the product.

Following are the major quality assurance tasks:
1. To develop a standard process for software development and quality assurance and to ensure
that that there is no deviation from the standards set.
2. To set guidelines for every step of the process, such as requirement templates, design
methodologies, coding standards, and so on.
3. To create checklists for every step of the process and verify the results of each step against the
subsequent guidelines and checklists.
4. To develop quality factors, quality criteria, and quality metrics and define a complete set of
quality factors.

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