Software quality/2
A student asked: What is a quality plan? When do you develop the quality plan? Who should be responsible for quality?”
Answer: The Quality plan describes how the management of quality will be applied to the project and confirms any quality standards, procedures, techniques that will be used in the project. Quality plan must be develop at the beginning of the project. It can be a separate plan or a part of the project plan, depending on the types of the project. Quality must be part of the software development process, not something to be measured at the end. Everybody on the project should be responsible for the quality, including project manager, developers, testers, quality assurance etc.
Quality is often defined differently depend on the domain. In the context of software or information system, quality is the functionality and the structure of the software product. The functional quality is based on how well the product complies with a given design, based on the software requirements specifications. The structural quality is based on the quality attributes that often is not clearly defined by the customers but a good software developer must add to the product such as performance, usability, testability, maintainability etc. A final product may meet all requirements but if it run very slow or difficult to use then it is still consider not a good quality product because it does not meet the structural quality requirements. Functional requirements can be measured through testing but structural quality can only be measured via the analysis of the source code and its architect and design.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
