Software Quality Assurance & Quality Control

Last night I talked with my Mrs. Tatik, Rita, Menik, & Noorchia. Mrs. Tatik asked me about software quality assurance. First I wonder why she so interested in IT, since she is studying in MSI UGM. Then I aware that in all kind of business, we should give great quality assurance for customers.

I remember that from history,we can see that failure in software engineering can cause big damage and deathly. You can read in Baselinemag. One the example that just happen is failure in Tokyo Stock Exchange last 2 weeks, where there is a system software error that cause USD 225 million lost.

In engineering and manufacturing, quality control and quality engineering are involved in developing systems to ensure products or services are designed and produced to meet or exceed customer requirements and expectations. These systems are often developed in conjunction with other business and engineering disciplines using a cross-functional approach.

Quality Assurance covers all activities from design, development, production, installation, servicing and documentation, this introduced the rules: "fit for purpose" and "do it right the first time". It includes the regulation of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components; services related to production; and management, production, and inspection processes. One of the most widely used paradigms for QA management is the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) approach, also known as the Shewhart cycle.

Baseline Magazine has some compelling stats that tell the story on the current state of software quality. Among the more interesting data points:

• 32% of organizations say that they release software with too many defects.


• 38% of organizations believe they lack an adequate software quality assurance program.


• 27% of organizations do not conduct any formal quality reviews.

Quality in software engineering is a controversial field. For some, software quality is a largely aesthetic and practical issue, dealing with the question of how efficiently and elegantly a computer program performs a task and source code looks (see Programming style). For others, quality is defined as strict conformance to requirements and absence of bugs. In both cases, there are sets of practices that are either required, or highly useful in this pursuit.



For me, customer satisfaction rating used to determine the quality of software. Since every user have different view about a software, if software that created can match their needs is enough. Software engineering is nothing if user not satisfied with the result.

More Readings:
http://newequities.typepad.com/newworkforce/2005/11/software_qualit.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_assurance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_quality
http://quality-assurance-software-testing.blogspot.com/
http://www.iquest-group.de/core_competences/softwareQA/softwareQA.php