SQA Audit

August 23, 2018

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SQA stands for ‘Software Quality Assurance’ and refers to the process of planning, reviewing and auditing a software project.A software has become an essential part of almost every sector and industry, hence its quality audit comprises of security and reliability as the two major criteria to be qualified as a successful application. Inevitably efficiency in performance is what defines a complete and robust framework.

It is quite astonishing to see the heights of glory we have achieved so far. Software quality audit is a much wider term that takes the bandwagon to incomprehensible heights. Software quality assurance is a technique of monitoring and assessing the development of the external and internal structure of a software.

Evolution in Technology:

It is an official inspection about software product with all its requirements and specifications. Most importantly, this is a thorough examination of all software abilities and checks whether a software application works as per decided objective or not. This analyzed approach and its study called audit.

SQA Audit

Let us throw some light on the evolution pattern in a software’s life cycle.

Any (software) product has a set of phases that goes through a series of phases and hence the concept of ‘quality audit’ emerges.

The above graph is a depiction of growth trend throughout the lifecycle of a software.

• The very initial phase of software begins which is just experimenting with the extent of acceptance among the users of the application.
• With the passage of time the target audience gets accustomed with the product’s features which makes it accepted among its users.
• Gradually the application attains stability among the users and gains accolades.
• The time grows so does the range of acceptance among end users.

The 'percent of adoption' is thus directly proportional to the passage of time. As the time flows users get to know about their product and it attains recognition among them.

Why SQA:

Software Quality Assurance is an integral part of a software development project’s life cycle. An independent team of tester specially for reviewing the artefacts of the project, so that auditor is aware of what is expected from the project and what has been actually done to achieve the objectives.

SQA is a strategy to perform some estimations, such as –

1. Risk Analysis.
2. Planning the test procedures.
3. Organising resources.
4. Monitor and control the performance of test execution.
5. Managing issues.
6. Reporting discrepancies if any.

Implementing SQA Plan:

1. Develop SQA Plan:A plan sets the goal for future endeavours, thus an SQA plan is a way to create a technique for assessing that the product being delivered is of an exceptional quality. The planning phase includes defining the roles and responsibilities of SQA team, enlisting work products that shall be reviewed by the auditors and creating a schedule to actually implement the tasks.
2. Define standards and methodology:This phase deals with measuring the activities against defined standards and procedures. The preliminary steps in this regard are-
• Defining the procedures to prevent defects.
• Documenting the policies and procedures.
• Train the staff to abide by those policies and procedures.
3. Review the process: Reviewing project activities is a process where the SQA members are expected to perform the following activities
• Reviewing the project’s plan.
• Software requirement specifications are reviewed.
• Reviewing test’s design plan.
• Review the overall test report before finally deploying the product.
• Analyse whether no aspect is left behind while closing the project.

Types of QA audit execution:

1. Planned: A planned audit is primarily aimed at ensuring consistency of quality so that the customer feels a sense of assurance.
2. Project based: A project is divided into various stages, hence each stage’s review is analysed to capture a better view of the project as a whole.
3. Custom:Such an audit is conducted as per the requirement of a company’s project needs.

SQA – A Complete Analysis:

An SQA team’s responsibility revolves around planning and scheduling test activities, gathering necessary resources, scheduling execution and implementation of test activities.

After test activities are carried out in full swing, SQA audit team prepares a report listing all the issues and defects and hence taking corrective actions for the same.

Summary:

A quality analysis/audit is a type of inspection process that is conducted to ensure that the entire effort towards building a product isn’t futile and that the project objective is aligned with the business objectives. Hence the audit process must achieve the following goals which are important from the CMMI perspective:

• Conformance to software development standards.
• All teams involved in the project development activities must be well informed about the policies and procedures.
• There could be a situation where some issue cannot be resolved, those should be reported to the senior management.