State of the art in software quality assurance

Abstract

The authors present a summary of their understanding of the publications that appeared in the computing literature during the last five-year period, with the word quality as part of their title and dealing with some or other aspects of software quality assurance. Specifically, the summary covers the following eight sub-topics, viz., (i) quality models; (ii) timely QA feedback; (iii) quantitative approaches to predicting software quality and the effectiveness of software QA; (iv) optimal choice of QA methods; (v) design level QA; (vi) impact of parallel development options on software quality; (vii) continued QA efforts even after the operational deployment of the software product; and (viii) use of CASE tools and perceived value for QA at NASA JPL. This digest also includes summaries of three short papers describing ongoing research on (i) prioritizing QA efforts; (ii) QA in an Agile development context; and (iii) presenting the software quality status to stakeholders during development. Major trends observed in the summary pertain to (i) continuing software QA efforts even after the operational deployment of the software product, which may also be pertinent to the proliferation of mobile applications; (ii) presenting the current software quality status to different stakeholders using concise sets of software metrics; and (iii) the effectiveness of hybrid approach of tool use combined with expert judgment for software QA. The emphasis on software QA activities spreading throughout the software product life cycle, from its beginning to end, is clearly observed in the reviewed literature.