Software Quality Assurance SQA?

Having discussed a basic definition of Software Quality Assurance SQA and Software Quality Control SQC as well as a formal implementation of these defined terms, this paper documents a typical (or hybrid) framework which benefits from the main goals of SQA\SQC without the organizational structure of the pure implementation.

First a caveat, the danger in environments where SQA\SQC is not formally implemented is that the ‘Quality Group’ becomes a kind of ‘Engineering Services’ group and do what ever the main development team does not currently (or does not want to) do. In many environments the SQA\SQC team reports to an application development manager and the ‘Engineering Services’ approach is very attractive to this manager. For example, let’s say performance is an ‘after thought’ that is not specified as a non-functional requirement, not designed into the system but noticed when things go wrong. Under the “Engineering Services” scenario it is tempting for the manager to send the QA person on a LoadRunner (or other load testing tool course) install the tool and declare the QA person ‘our performance expert’. This type of approach will not work, the QA team member should be able to perform load testing (as part of SQC) but the performance requirements (that are tested for) should be part of the requirements and the Designer\Programmer should ‘own’ the performance objective.

So, accepting that SQA\SQC have to be separate from development activities and certain (mainly Requirement and Design) activities always need to take place, let’s look at a hybrid, or generalized, approach to SQA. SQA and SQC will be referred to as Software QA and the activities of this person(s) represent a good ROI for achieving the goals of SQA\SQC with a limited resource.

Note: This is only a sample of SDLC activities but role of Software QA against these activities should illustrate the kind of roles that a general Software QA person should undertake.

Resource : http://www.sqa.net/sqa-practice.html

Wow, is that ms R4nj1ni 1st assignment.........SQA, goodluck