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Michał Szymerski

Rafał Staszewski

Quality in IT project

What is quality?

What is quality?

Quality (according to ISO 9000:2000) is the ability of the

product and all its integral parts to satisfy demands of

the customer or any other entity that commisioned the

project (conformance to specifications)

Essential subjects related to quality are:

•

Satisfaction of the customer is the main criteria of

quality

•

Prevention is more crucial than inspection

•

Management responsibility

• Although teamwork is important and essential to

completion of the project, the main entity responsible for

the project is the management

Quality Management

Quality Management



Quality assurance:

Set of functions that are carried out throughout the

process of the project creation, that aims at providing

overall quality in the project



Quality inspection:

Inspecting each and every product of the project in

order to assess their compatibility with the project

requirements



Quality planning:

Assurance of quality must be planned in order to fully

satisfy customer’s demand

Quality Planning

Quality Planning

Quality planning – should start in the early phase of software creation
The basis to quality planning in a project is the overall quality policy of the

company(what is the managements idea twoards quality related problems). It is

important to note that that this „policy” should not be strict but rather customized

twoards individual projects.

The main factors that should be concidered in quality policy:



The projects scope



The products description



Standards and regulaitons well adjusted twoards the scope of the project.

Standards are orders describing the workflow and characteristics of the product.
Regulations are the non flexible , law requirements, organization requirements.

While planning the quality it is important to take into concideration the results of other

forms of planning.

One of the elemetns of Q.P. is working with the user in order to verify if the way the

project is being developed, satisfies him. (For software developement that would

be using prototypes)

Quality management -

Quality management -

standards

standards

ISO (International Standards

Organization)

• Established in 1987

• Recognized worldwide

• International set of five related standards for qualification

of global quality assurance and quality control standards

• Adherence is accomplished through an application

process for ISO 9000 certification in company standards

for inspecting production processes, updating records,

maintaining equipment, training employees and handling

customer relations

• Procedures must be documented in company’s quality

manual that defines the quality ensurance process.

Standards continued

Standards continued

•

ISO 9001 – most general standard of the ISO 9000

•

Applies to companies that develop and create products

•

ISO 9000-3 – auxilary document that describes software
development

ISO 9000

Company’s quality

manual

Quality ensurance

plan 2

Quality

ensurance plan 3

Quality ensurance

plan 1

Company’s quality

processes

Venture quality

management

Used in development of

documents

Its entity is

Quality management plan

Quality management plan

•

Result of quality planning

•

Specifies desired product quality

•

Specifies quality criterias

•

Specifies company standards that are to be used in

project

•

Should be kept short

•

Defines most important quality attributes

Quality management plan

Quality management plan

- ctd

- ctd

Security

Adaptability

Protection

Clearness

Modularity

Fitness to testing

Reliability

Immunity

Solidity

Complexity

Learning curve

Efectiveness

Reusability

Ease of use

Portability

Quality assurance

Quality assurance

The process of quality assurance is a set of functions that is needed in

order for the project to meet its standards.

We may specify 2 types of standards, that are part of quality assurance

process:

1)Product standards – they relate to the project. They incorporate

document standards that need to be created, such as requirements

documentation hierarchy/structure , documenting standards ( expl.

Commentary in the objects header), coding standards.

2)Process standards – they define the processes that need to be obeyed

durring software developement. This includes defining specification

processes as well as document descriptions (that should be created

durring developement).

There is a strict bond between quality and process standards.
Product standards relate to the results of software developement process.
In many cases process standards include specific process tasks, whos goal

is to provide compliance with the product standards.

Quality Assurance ctd.

Quality Assurance ctd.

Quality assurance in projects is mostly done by an outside,

project independant quality assurance branch/team, but can

also be done by a team inside the project , specificly

designated for this task, or by the client himself.

Q.A. teams that develop standards should base them upon

national and international standards such as:



Progamming languages



Notations



Software enginering terminology



Defining and writing requirements for software.



Quality assurance processes and verification and aproval

processes

Quality assurance team should develop a "standards manual”, in

which standards apropriate for the company should be

defined.

Process and Product Quality

Process and Product Quality

The main assumption of quality management is that the quality of the

creation process has a direct influence on the quality of the

delivered product and thus it has a very important influence on

software quality

Contrary to mass production systems (in which achieving an

acceptable level of process quality guarantees a sustainable

product quality), quality management in software development

must be ensured in each and every development project or cycle

Quality management process incorporates:

1)

Defining processes’ standards

(such as the way we make our audits, their time, precision etc)

2)

Monitoring the creation process in order to assure that

standards are being obeyed

3)

Informing the management and the client about our software

developement process

The basic technique of quality assurance are audits of the quality

(systematic checks aimed at finding eventual incompatibilities

with the used standards)

Standards creation

Standards creation

Create product

Define process

Proper

Quality

Improve Process

Measure Quality

Develop standard

No

Yes

Quality control:

Quality control:

Quality control handles products, half-products and

management work results

The basic technique of quality control is inspection. This

is checking and testing products in order to state if

they comply with their requirements. Inspections are

the basis for management decisions regarding the

acceptance of a product

Frequent occurences of similar problems should be a

basis for modification of the work processes leading to

them

Software quality standards are important for quality

assurance because they are a set of „best guidlines”.

Following these guidelines makes our project better

Software quality measures:

Software quality measures:

Quality needs to be measurable. For every project, a set of

measurements, which will be calculated durring the project’s

life, must be prepared. The most simple types of quality

measures for software developement projects are the number

of errors encountered during the process of system usage and

the time between their encounters

Other types of measures are:

-

The amount of code in lines

-

Fog index (the measure of the readability of a certain

fragment of text)

S.Q.M. are especially very useful when it comes to detecting

anomalous components, in which we have quality problems.

Those components need to be thouroughly examined later

There are no standard or universal measures. Companies must

themselves pick their measures and analize the results based

on local knowledge and conditions

Quality evaluation

Quality evaluation

Inspection of production process is the most commonly

used quality evaluation method

Software measurements are used to accumulate

quantitative data about programming and software

development techniques. Acquired data can be used to

make conclusions about quality of the product and

process used

Quality management is an important part of the project,

however – it must accompany the project budget; the

lower the budget for quality management – the lower

quality of the project

Quality improvement process

Quality improvement process

The fundamental assumption of quality

improvement process is that product development

process is most crucial to the overall quality of

the project

Improving the production process in order to avoid

defects leads to better products

In case of innovative products, people are often

more important than actual production process

used

Factors that impact quality

Factors that impact quality

In

In

f

f

luence of any of these factors depends on the

luence of any of these factors depends on the

scale and type of venture

scale and type of venture

Product Quality

Technology used

Team

quality

Process

quality

Expenses, time,

schedule

Factors that impact quality

Factors that impact quality

Large ventures*

The main problems:



Integration



Management



Communication

* large - complicated systems that are composed of

many separate subsystems built by many different

teams, in which product development can take

many years

Factors that impact quality

Factors that impact quality

Small ventures

In case of small ventures, quality of the project team

members is much more important than development

process used.



Good team should deliver a good project



Inexperienced and incompetent team will, in most

cases, not produce product of desired quality

regardless of development technique used



Development technique especially important in case

of small teams



Paperwork should never hold back the project



Since team members spend a lot of time on planning

and programming, adequate tools will greatly

increase their productivity

Factors that impact quality

Factors that impact quality

Regardless of project size, too little budget and

unrealistic expectations of project completion

date will greatly affect or ruin the overall quality

of the project

Fierce competition often casues companies to

unnaturaly lower project costs in order to win

contracts. This often leads to grave results as the

project fails to have a suitable budget.

Literature

Literature



Ian Sommerville- „Inżynieria oprogramowania”
WNT 2003



Wikipedia



Internet sources