scholarly journals Software Quality Assurance in an Undergraduate Software Engineering Program

Author(s):  
Claude Y. Laporte ◽  
Alain April

Software tests are used by most organizations. However, many other software quality assurance practices are often neglected. Most developers are not aware of the high cost of inferior quality and its impact on the duration and budget of a project. At the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), software quality assurance (SQA) is taught in lecture format in the undergraduate software engineering curriculum. The SQA course covers the concepts of the business modeland the cost of quality, to convince students of the importance of putting in place adequate prevention and evaluation practices, both to reduce the number of defects and to predict the extra effort needed to correct defects introduced as the work progresses.The course includes a 10-week capstone project in which teams of 4 students apply the SQA practices taught inclass in a software development assignment. The students collect measures throughout the 10-week period, and the performance of each team is analyzed. This analysis allows discussion to take place on the positive impact of SQA practices as a way to deliver quality software on time and within budget.

Author(s):  
Alison Adam ◽  
Paul Spedding

This article considers the question of how we may trust automatically generated program code. The code walkthroughs and inspections of software engineering mimic the ways that mathematicians go about assuring themselves that a mathematical proof is true. Mathematicians have difficulty accepting a computer generated proof because they cannot go through the social processes of trusting its construction. Similarly, those involved in accepting a proof of a computer system or computer generated code cannot go through their traditional processes of trust. The process of software verification is bound up in software quality assurance procedures, which are themselves subject to commercial pressures. Quality standards, including military standards, have procedures for human trust designed into them. An action research case study of an avionics system within a military aircraft company illustrates these points, where the software quality assurance (SQA) procedures were incommensurable with the use of automatically generated code.


Author(s):  
Alison Adam ◽  
Paul Spedding

This chapter considers the question of how we may trust automatically generated program code. The code walkthroughs and inspections of software engineering mimic the ways that mathematicians go about assuring themselves that a mathematical proof is true. Mathematicians have difficulty accepting a computer generated proof because they cannot go through the social processes of trusting its construction. Similarly, those involved in accepting a proof of a computer system or computer generated code cannot go through their traditional processes of trust. The process of software verification is bound up in software quality assurance procedures, which are themselves subject to commercial pressures. Quality standards, including military standards, have procedures for human trust designed into them. An action research case study of an avionics system within a military aircraft company illustrates these points, where the software quality assurance (SQA) procedures were incommensurable with the use of automatically generated code.


2009 ◽  
pp. 2435-2449
Author(s):  
Alison Adam ◽  
Paul Spedding

This article considers the question of how we may trust automatically generated program code. The code walkthroughs and inspections of software engineering mimic the ways that mathematicians go about assuring themselves that a mathematical proof is true. Mathematicians have difficulty accepting a computer generated proof because they cannot go through the social processes of trusting its construction. Similarly, those involved in accepting a proof of a computer system or computer generated code cannot go through their traditional processes of trust. The process of software verifi- cation is bound up in software quality assurance procedures, which are themselves subject to commercial pressures. Quality standards, including military standards, have procedures for human trust designed into them. An action research case study of an avionics system within a military aircraft company illustrates these points, where the software quality assurance (SQA) procedures were incommensurable with the use of automatically generated code.


Author(s):  
Praveen Ranjan Srivastava ◽  
Ajit Pratap Singh ◽  
Vageesh K. V.

Software Quality Assurance consists of monitoring the software engineering processes and ensuring the highest quality. But, the software quality attributes that we deal with are not explicit in the outset and cannot be easily measured. The same attribute has multiple significance and importance in multiple contexts. The user, the developer and the manager of a software product may have different stands regarding the significance of a quality attribute. A software quality engineer, while measuring the total software quality should provide appropriate weight to each of the decision makers. This chapter proposes a fuzzy multi-criteria approach to measure the total software quality and to identify the best alternative from a set of software products.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Pablo Orviz Fernández ◽  
Mário David ◽  
Doina Cristina Duma ◽  
Elisabetta Ronchieri ◽  
Jorge Gomes ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
pp. 000312242097180
Author(s):  
Santiago Campero

Women tend to be segregated into different subspecialties than men within male-dominated occupations, but the mechanisms contributing to such intra-occupational gender segregation remain obscure. In this study, I use data from an online recruiting platform and a survey to examine the hiring mechanisms leading to gender segregation within software engineering and development. I find that women are much more prevalent among workers hired in software quality assurance than in other software subspecialties. Importantly, jobs in software quality assurance are lower-paying and perceived as lower status than jobs in other software subspecialties. In examining the origins of this pattern, I find that it stems largely from women being more likely than men to apply for jobs in software quality assurance. Further, such gender differences in job applications are attenuated among candidates with stronger educational credentials, consistent with the idea that relevant accomplishments help mitigate gender differences in self-assessments of competence and belonging in these fields. Demand-side selection processes further contribute to gender segregation, as employers penalize candidates with quality assurance backgrounds, a subspecialty where women are overrepresented, when they apply for jobs in other, higher-status software subspecialties.


Author(s):  
Raquel Lacuesta ◽  
Luis Fernández-Sanz ◽  
María del Pilar Romay

Development of mobile applications is a complex task due to the specific characteristics of the environment. Although different proposals to offer more practical and systematic processes have been published within the so-called mobile software engineering, it is still necessary to devise more advanced methods, especially in the area of software quality assurance. This chapter presents a set of practices to support quality control by developers based on the adoption of methods from traditional software engineering focused on effective requirements specification and associated methods for generating practical testing procedures.


2008 ◽  
pp. 1152-1166
Author(s):  
Alison Adam ◽  
Paul Spedding

This article considers the question of how we may trust automatically generated program code. The code walkthroughs and inspections of software engineering mimic the ways that mathematicians go about assuring themselves that a mathematical proof is true. Mathematicians have difficulty accepting a computer generated proof because they cannot go through the social processes of trusting its construction. Similarly, those involved in accepting a proof of a computer system or computer generated code cannot go through their traditional processes of trust. The process of software verification is bound up in software quality assurance procedures, which are themselves subject to commercial pressures. Quality standards, including military standards, have procedures for human trust designed into them. An action research case study of an avionics system within a military aircraft company illustrates these points, where the software quality assurance (SQA) procedures were incommensurable with the use of automatically generated code.


Author(s):  
Alain April ◽  
Claude Y. Laporte

This chapter introduces the generally accepted knowledge on software quality that has been included in the (SWEBOK) Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (ISOTR 19759, 2005). One chapter of the SWEBOK is dedicated to software quality (April et al., 2005). It argues that ethics play an important role in applying the quality models and the notions of cost of quality for software engineers. It also describes the minimal content required in a software quality assurance plan. Finally an overview of what to expect in the upcoming international standards on software quality requirements, which transcend the life cycle activities of all IT processes, is presented.


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