SQA Management Standards and Metrics

SQA Management Standards and Metrics

SQA Management Standards
Aside from internationally recognized SQA standards, there are specific standards that were developed to cater specifically for the management of software development:

ISO 9001 and ISO 9000-3 – These certifying organizations was established specifically for software development. This standard encourages leadership and could be integrated continuously even when the product has been developed and released to its users. Good supplier relations are also emphasized as technology is not only developed in-house.

SW-CMM (Software Capability Maturity Model) – Developed in 1980, SW-CMM has become the standards for large scale software development companies. It has drawn support because this development model was established by the developers for the developers. It believes in quantitative methods to develop and maintain productivity. SW-CMM has a five-level model to gauge the applications maturity and establish a detailed plan to further enhance them. The best draw so far of SW-CMM is that it does not care about SDLC model, tool and documentation standard, promoting creativity for software development.

ISO/IEC 15504 Process Assessment Model and SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) – Aiming for international acceptance, this type of SQA supports a specific type of testing standard for a better application. Called SPICE, this application could test each part of the application. SPICE is also used to asses the performance of circuits in electronic products.
Metrics
There are many forms of metrics in SQA but they can easily be divided into three categories: product evaluation, product quality, and process auditing.

Product Evaluation Metrics – Basically, this type of metric is actually the number of hours the SQA member would spend to evaluate the application. Developers who might have a good application would solicit lesser product evaluation while it could take more when tackling an application that is rigged with errors. The numbers extracted from this metric will give the SQA team a good estimate on the timeframe for the product evaluation.

Product Quality Metrics – These metrics tabulates all the possible errors in the application. These numbers will show how many errors there are and where do they come from. The main purpose of this metric is to show the trend in error. When the trend is identified the common source of error is located. This way, developers can easily take care of the problem compared to answering smaller divisions of the problem. There are also metrics that shows the actual time of correcting the errors of the application. This way, the management team who are not entirely familiar with the application.

Process Audit Metrics – These metrics will show how the application works. These metrics are not looking for errors but performance. One classic example of this type of metric is the actual response time compared to the stress placed on the application. Businesses will always look for this metric since they want to make sure the application will work well even when there are thousands of users of the application at the same time.

There are lots of options on what standard to be used in developing the plan for Software Quality Assurance. But on metrics, the numbers are always constant and will be the gauge whether the application works as planned.