AAUP Course (1): Software Verification and Validation

The SQA activities described in the preceding section are performed to achieve a set of pragmatic goals:

Requirements quality. The correctness, completeness, and consistency of the requirements model will have a strong influence on the quality of all work products that follow. SQA must ensure that the software team has properly reviewed the requirements model to achieve a high level of quality.

Design quality. Every element of the design model should be assessed by the software team to ensure that it exhibits high quality and that the design itself conforms to requirements. SQA looks for attributes of the design that are indicators of quality. 

Code quality. Source code and related work products (e.g., other descriptive information) must conform to local coding standards and exhibit characteristics that will facilitate maintainability. SQA should isolate those attributes that allow a reasonable analysis of the quality of code.

Quality control effectiveness. A software team should apply limited resources in a way that has the highest likelihood of achieving a high-quality result. SQA analyzes the allocation of resources for reviews and testing to assess whether they are being allocated in the most effective manner. 

Figure 21.1 (adapted from [Hya96]) identifi es the attributes that are indicators for the existence of quality for each of the goals discussed. Metrics that can be used to indicate the relative strength of an attribute are also shown.