Role of process in software quality

Role of process in software quality

The need for software products of high quality has pressured those in the profession to identify and quantify quality factors such as usability, testability, maintainability, and reliability, and to identify engineering practices that support the production of quality products having these favorable attributes. Among the practices identified that contribute to the development of high-quality software are project planning, requirements management, development of formal specifications, structured design with use of information hiding and encapsulation, design and code reuse, inspections and reviews, product and process measures, education and training of software professionals, development and application of CASE tools, use of effective testing techniques, and integration of testing activities into the entire life cycle. In addition to identifying these individual best technical and managerial practices, software researchers realized that it was important to integrate them within the context of a high-quality software development process.

Process, in the software engineering domain, is the set of methods, practices, standards, documents, activities, policies, and procedures that software engineers use to develop and maintain a software system and its associated artifacts, such as project and test plans, design documents, code, and manuals.

It also was clear that adding individual practices to an existing software development process in an ad hoc way was not satisfactory. The software development process, like most engineering artifacts, must be engineered. That is, it must be designed, implemented, evaluated, and maintained. As in other engineering disciplines, a software development process must evolve in a consistent and predictable manner, and the best technical and managerial practices must be integrated in a systematic way. These models allow an organization to evaluate its current software process and to capture an understanding of its state. Strong support for incremental process improvement is provided by the models, consistent with historical process evolution and the application of quality principles. The models have received much attention from industry, and resources have been invested in process improvement efforts with many successes recorded.

All the software process improvement models that have had wide acceptance in industry are high-level models, in the sense that they focus on the software process as a whole and do not offer adequate support to evaluate and improve specific software development sub processes such as design and testing. Most software engineers would agree that testing is a vital component of a quality software process, and is one of the most challenging and costly activities carried out during software development and maintenance.