• Home
  • Software Quality Assurance

Software Quality Assurance 

    Upcoming Events

    View Calendar
Please contact Deep Creek Center for information on scheduling a course.
Course Length
 3 days


Proactive SQA™ is a key basis of significant value-enhancing revisions to IEEE SQA Std. 730’s often-resisted “traffic cop” enforcement of procedural compliance. SQA also addresses but is not synonymous with tail-end quality control (QC) testing, catching errors right before they go out the door when they are too expensive and risky to fix. Effective systems organizations realize SQA can and should do far more, contributing proactively to assure the software process in fact does the right things well so it truly produces high quality cheaper by catching and preventing errors early.

What You Will Accomplish

This interactive workshop explains common SQA misconceptions and the six functions SQA should perform that provide far greater value, analyzes why SQA groups so frequently have failed in IS, and presents practical approaches for successfully using SQA effectively throughout any life cycle to produce high quality systems. Exercises enhance learning. Participants will learn:
  • Reasons for SQA failures and factors critical to success of SQA in IS development.
  • Common interpretations of what SQA is and issues with them.
  • The six Proactive Software Quality Assurance™ functions that SQA should perform.
  • Proven quality management and review methods for promoting quality and preventing errors.
  • A structured Proactive Testing* model of which testing activities should be performed when and by whom within the life cycle to maximize testing efficiency and effectiveness.
  • Truly agile test planning techniques that prevent showstoppers.
  • Designing tests that spot numerous ordinarily overlooked defects in less time.
  • Writing industry-accepted test plans and test designs.
  • Applying risk analysis, reusable testware, and metrics to perform more thorough testing in less time.
  • Measuring system quality and SQA/Testing effectiveness.

Who Should Attend

This course has been designed for quality and testing specialists, systems and business managers, project leaders, analysts, auditors, and others responsible for information system quality.


SYSTEM/SOFTWARE QUALITY AND QUALITY ASSURANCE
  • Exercise: What is quality, quality assurance
  • Quality in the project manager’s triangle
  • Quality is free, cost of poor quality
  • What we, others mean by quality
  • Need for positive common quality definition
  • Quality factors and quality dimensions
  • Engineered Deliverable Quality™
  • Quality assurance vs. quality control
  • SQA in IEEE Stds. 12207 and 730
  • Proactive SQA changes in IEEE Std. 730
  • Not just ‘traffic cop’ compliance
SYSTEM/SOFTWARE PROCESSES
  • REAL vs. Presumed processes, silos
  • Exercise: Your software process
  • Defect injection, detection, ejection metrics
  • Economics of quality problems in life cycle
  • Making the business case for SQA
  • Life cycle concepts, waterfall vs. iterative
  • Process capability, variation, improvement
  • Project, process, product measures
  • Direct and indirect process evaluation
  • SEI Process Capability Maturity Models
QUALITY ASSURANCE CONCEPTS
  • Exercise: Why SQA groups so often fail
  • SQA groups’ changes over time
  • Common SQA interpretations, issues
  • Quality control (QC) testing
  • ‘QA Test’
  • Document and procedure compliance
  • ‘QA Reviews’ and toll gates
  • Standards and procedures manuals
  • Staffing and organizational influence
  • Reasons for resistance to SQA
  • SQA needs broader view of quality
  • Proactive SQA™ for effectiveness
  • Assuring processes vs. doing it all
  • 6 functions of effective software QA
  • QA Plans, quality reviews of deliverables
  • Exercise: Managing SQA tasks, resources
  • Engineering standards, conventions
  • Quality controls at all key points
  • Project control
  • Configuration management, checkpoints
  • Record keeping and auditing
  • Metrics and analysis for improvement
  • Exercise: Key product and process metrics
  • Promoting awareness and recognition
ACTIVE STATIC TESTING
  • Role of requirements in producing quality
  • Exercise: ‘Established Requirements’ issues
  • Exercise: Reviewing Requirements
  • Unrecognized weaknesses of “Regular Way”
  • Why review of requirements fails
  • Formal technical reviews, procedures
  • Review approaches, formality
  • Often overlooked walk through limitations
  • Why reviews so economically find defects
  • Foundation technique, topic guidelines
  • Evaluating requirements form, testability
  • REAL, business vs. system requirements
  • Finding overlooked, incorrect requirements
  • Reviewing design suitability and content
  • Four powerful design review CAT-Scans
  • Exercise: Reviews and Software Process QA
HOW TESTING CAN CUT EFFORT & TIME
  • Testing for correctness vs. testing for errors
  • Developer views of testing
  • Reactive testing—out of time, but not tests
  • Proactive Testing™ Life Cycle model
  • CAT-Scan Approach™ to find more errors
  • Dynamic, passive and active static testing
  • V-model and objectives of each test level
  • Developer vs. independent test group testing
  • Strategy—create fewer errors, catch more
  • Four keys to effective testing
  • Need for testing sampling
  • Written vs. not written benefits and issues
  • Test activities that save the developer’s time
  • The “we don’t have time” fallacy
TEST PLANNING VALUE NOT BUSYWORK
  • Risk elements, relation to testing
  • Proactive vs. reactive risk analysis
  • IEEE Standard for Test Documentation
  • Benefits of the structure
  • Enabling manageability, reuse, selectivity
  • Test plans vs. test designs, cases, procedures
  • Exercise: Anticipating showstoppers
  • Risk-based way to define test units
  • Letting testing drive development
  • Preventing major cause of overruns
  • Master Test Plan counterpart to project plan
  • Approach, use of automated tools
  • Entry/exit criteria, anticipating change
DETAILED TEST PLANNING
  • IEEE Standard on Unit Testing
  • Functional (Black Box) testing strategy
  • 3-level top-down test planning and design
  • Exercise: Functionality matrix
  • Detailed Test Plan technical document
  • White box structural testing coverage
  • Use cases, revealing overlooked conditions
  • Exercise: Defining use case test coverage
INTEGRATION/SYSTEM TEST PLANNING
  • Graphical technique to simplify integrations
  • Integration test plans prevent schedule slips
  • Smoke tests; system and special testing
  • Daily, top- and bottom-down builds strategy
DESIGNING AND WRITING TEST CASES
  • Exercise: Your challenges and issues
  • Exercise: Disciplined brainstorming
  • Checklists find more overlooked conditions
  • Data formats, data and process models
  • Business rules, decision tables and trees
  • Equivalence classes and boundary values
  • Formal, informal Test Design Specifications
  • Leveraging reusable test designs
  • Test Case Specifications vs. test data values
  • Writing test cases, script/matrix
  • Embedding keystroke-level procedural detail
  • Exploratory testing applied most effectively
MEASURING AND MANAGING TESTING
  • Estimating
  • Defect isolation
  • Defect reporting, categories and analysis
  • Defect reports that prompt suitable action
  • Exercise: Measures for managing testing
  • Common measures of test status, issues
  • Exercise: Test status report audiences
  • Projecting when software is good enough
  • Exercise: Measuring testing effectiveness
  • Exercise: Post-Implementation Review


Please contact Deep Creek Center for information.
It is only a solution if it produces the desired results.