Software Quality Assurance

Even the most jaded software developers will agree that high-quality software is an important target.  But how do we describe quality? A wag once said, every program does something right, it just may not be the thing which we need it to do

There have been many definitions of software quality proposed in the literature. For our purposes software quality is described as:

"The Conformance to explicitly state functional and performance requirements explicitly documented development standards and implicit characteristics that are expected of all professionally developed software".

There is short question which above definition could be extended or modified. If fact is a definitive definition of software quality could be debated endlessly. By the purposes of this book the above definition serves to emphasize 3 important points:

1.  Software needs are the foundation from that quality is measured. Lack of conformance to needs is lack of quality.

2.  Specified standards describe a set of development criteria which guide the manner in that software is engineered if the criteria are not followed lack of quality will almost surely resulted.

3.  There  is  a  set  of  implicit  needs which  often  goes  unmentioned for  example the  desire  for  good maintainability if software conforms to its explicit needs but fails to meet implicit needs software quality is suspect.