Page 188 - SOFTWARE TESTING & QUALITY ASSURANCE

Unit 12: Software Quality Assurance

Service Support
IT service support consists of processes oriented towards the efficient delivery of IT operational
services. The processes are as follows:

1. Service Desk Function: It serves as a main point of contact for customers and supports the
management process in providing the resolution.
2. Incident Management: It is accountable for maintaining regular position of IT service operations
as quickly as possible to minimize the adverse impact on business processes.
3. Problem Management: It reduces the unfavorable impact of incidents and problems on the
business operations caused due to errors in the IT infrastructure and effectively manages the
problems that occur.
4. Configuration Management: It is accountable for recognizing, recording, and reporting on
configuration items and their relationships to the supporting IT service department.
5. Change Management: It organizes and controls all changes to the IT services to reduce the
adverse impact of those changes on business operations and the end users of IT services.
6. Release Management: It implements the various changes to IT services by taking various views of
customers, employees, technology, and IT governance that supports all aspects of a change which
include planning, designing, building and testing activities.
Service Delivery
IT service delivery includes processes that are associated with the long-term planning, control, and
managerial aspects of IT services. The processes include:

1. Service-level Management: It organizes, plans, coordinates, negotiates, reports, and supervises
the quality of IT services at the agreed upon cost.
2. Availability Management: It is accountable for increasing the ability of the IT infrastructure
services and supports organizations to deliver a cost-effective and sustained level of service that
meets business requirements.
3. Capacity Management: It ensures that future and current capacity and performance aspects of
the IT infrastructure are supplied on time to meet up business requirements at an agreed upon
cost.
4. Service Continuity Management: It is accountable for business stability management functions by
ensuring that IT services are stable even in the event of a major business interruption.

5. Financial Management for IT Services: It provides budgeting, accounting, and charging services
in order to manage and control the IT costs and expenditures.
6. Security Management: It is accountable for reducing security-related incidents by effectively
managing privacy, discretion, integrity, and availability of IT services.

7. Applications Management: It handles various applications from the initial business setup
throughout the stages of application life cycle till retirement.
8. Software Asset Management: It implements good corporate governance system to manage,
control, and safeguard the organization’s software assets, as well as those risks arising from the
use of software assets.

The major standards established by the ITSM processes are ISO 20000 and
CobiT.

Recently, the best practices and standards of IT identified quality as a process and recognized the value
of a quality management system.

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