Identify new Software Quality Assurance needs for the UK e-Science community and reintroduction for the right tools to improve evolved software engineering processes

Software Quality Assurance (QA) is defined as the methodology and good practices for ensuring the quality of software in development. It involves in handling bug reports, bug tracking, error investigation, verification of fixed bugs, test management, test case plan and design, as well as test case execution and records. Standards such as ISO 9001 are commonly followed for software QA, which recommends using a wide range of tools to improve the existing software engineering processes (SEP) for the organisations [1]. One identified problem is that software engineering is often a fast-evolved development that often the organisation’s software QA activities and tools lag behind the actual requirements, thus affecting the measurement of real quality of software products [2,3]. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify new software QA needs and reintroduce the right tools for Software QA, which has made its good impacts for our SEP. Based on the literature [1,2,3], QA experience and our ENGAGE interview records, the following areas that require more focus on Software QA, are described in next section