Software Project Management Brochure Template Page 20

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20
Handbook on Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering
automated testing tools is recommended. Project managers should adopt the
practice of enforcing thorough testing in every iteration, and not allowing the
next iteration to begin before all the tests planned in the current iteration are
completed. The entire project is considered completed only when all the UML
models and all the tests are completed and delivered.
Software Quality Assurance
The goals of software quality assurance (SQA) are monitoring the software and
its development process, ensuring compliance with standards and procedures,
and ensuring that product, process, and standards defects are visible to
management [26].
Quality is the operational behavior of a product required by its users [8]. It
comprises a set of product characteristics, both external and internal. External
quality characteristics are related to how the product works in its environment
(e.g., usability and reliability). Internal quality characteristics reflect how the
product is developed (characteristics such as structural complexity, size, test
coverage, and fault rates). Important factors affecting product’s quality
characteristics are process maturity level of the company that has developed the
software product, its development environment (such as the design methodology
and CASE tools used), and the development team’s skill and experience.
It is desirable for a software development organization to plan and control
product quality during development. Projects managers cannot allow the luxury
of going back and adding quality - by the time a quality problem is detected, it is
probably too late to fix it [39]. For that reason, it is necessary to establish
procedures and expectations for high levels of quality before any other
development begins. Also, hiring developers proven to develop high-quality
code, staffing the project accordingly, and enforcing peer-level code reviews and
external reviews must be top priority of every software project management.
Planning and controlling software product quality during development
requires [8]:
establishing targets for the external quality characteristics;
pursuing those targets during development by defining and monitoring
targets for internal quality characteristics - this can be done using
conventional software measures of size, fault rates, change rates,
structure, test coverage, and so on, taken early in product development;
establishing relationships between internal and external quality
characteristics, using experience from similar past software development
projects;
identifying and setting targets for internal quality characteristics.
In practice, all this can be done by first defining a quality model (in terms of
measurable quality characteristics; it can be an international standard like ISO
9126, or a company-specific model), and then applying a quality process.

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