Software Quality Assurance - Concepts and Misconceptions

Software quality engineering is concerned with building software products with required quality and assessing the level of quality. Software processes are important assets in achieving and assessing the software quality. Furthermore the adherence to defined processes is a key issue to having the software engineering under control and to enable process improvement. The software quality assurance (SQA) key process area in the capability maturity model (CMM) is elaborated, i.e. activities for monitoring adherence to the processes. The term SQA creates some misconceptions and confusions with the general quality management concept. The SQA concept is compared to quality management and the differences and similarities are elaborated in order to eliminate the misconceptions. Furthermore, some experiences from supporting the implementation of the SQA concepts in two different software companies are briefly reported