The main goals of the Quality Assurance team are:
to provide a "bug-free" application;
to bring into the application innovative ideas that could improve the way the system works;
to make sure that the software complies with the standards, procedures or product requirements of the client.
Among the software quality requirements are included:
Correctness Assurance that the data entered, processed, and outputted by the application system is accurate and complete. Accuracy and completeness are achieved through controls over transactions and data elements, which should commence when a transaction is originated and conclude when the transaction data has been used for its intended purpose.
Reliability Assurance that the application will perform its intended function with the required precision over an extended period of time. The correctness of processing deals with the ability of the system to process valid transactions correctly, while reliability relates to the system's being able to perform correctly over an extended period of time when placed into production.
Ease of use The extent of effort required to learn, operate, prepare input for, and interpret output from the system. This test factor deals with the usability of the system to the people interfacing with the application system.
Easily maintainable Maintainability consists of readability, extendibility and testability of a program.
*Readability: Well structured and documented source code will raise the
readability. The meaningful use of comments in the source code completes the
implementation.
*Extendibility: The source code is concluded in a meaningful way, so it shall be
easy, with the help of the comments to expand the system with new facilities.
*Testability: The organization of the system into modules will help testing the
code.
Efficiency Sometimes long waiting times occur by accessing the database. Maybe the network resources, problems with the network file system or the capacity of the database management system may be the reasons for these problems.
Portability The effort required to transfer a program from one hardware configuration and/or software system environment to another. The effort includes data conversion, program changes, operating system, and documentation changes.
File integrity Assurance that the data entered into the application system will be returned unaltered. The file integrity procedures ensure that the right file is used and that data on the file and sequence in which the data is stored and retrieved is correct.
Authorization Assurance that data is processed in accordance with the intents of management. In an application system, there is both general and specific authorization for processing of transactions. General authorization governs the authority to conduct different types of business, while specific authorization provides the authority to perform a specific act.
Compliance Assurance that the system is designed in accordance with organizational strategy, policies, procedures and standards. These requirements need to be identified, implemented, and maintained in conjunction with other application requirements.
Although for many people "quality" means "conformance to requirements", this does not usually capture all the important attributes that contribute to quality software. Software that works correctly and performs all its functionality efficiently may not necessarily be high quality software. It may be difficult to use.
As each person's priorities differ, how they judge the quality of a piece of software also differs. A user may consider a piece of software high quality while the system's administrators consider it low quality. For software to be considered high quality it must address the priorities of all different users.
Software quality assurance goals are achieved through:
A coordinated collection of processes (usually referred to as a management system) embodying:
* the techniques;
* methodologies; and
* tools used by an organization.
The organization staff.
|
