Software Quality Assurance W15L30 Instructor: Saliha Zahoor

Quality Management
Managing the quality of the software process and products

Objectives
To introduce the quality management process and key quality management activities To explain the role of standards in quality management To explain the concept of a software metric, predictor metrics and control metrics To explain how measurement may be used in assessing software quality

Topics covered
Quality assurance and standards Quality planning Quality control Software measurement and metrics

Software quality management

Concerned with ensuring that the required level of quality is achieved in a software product Involves defining appropriate quality standards and procedures and ensuring that these are followed Should aim to develop a quality culture where quality is seen as everyones responsibility

What is quality?
Quality, simplistically, means that a product should meet its specification This is problematical for software systems
Tension between customer quality requirements (efficiency, reliability, etc.) and developer quality requirements (maintainability, reusability, etc.) Some quality requirements are difficult to specify in an unambiguous way Software specifications are usually incomplete and often inconsistent

The quality compromise

We cannot wait for specifications to improve before paying attention to quality management Must put procedures into place to improve quality in spite of imperfect specification Quality management is therefore not just concerned with reducing defects but also with other product qualities

Quality management activities

Quality assurance
Establish organisational procedures and standards for quality

Quality planning
Select applicable procedures and standards for a particular project and modify these as required

Quality control
Ensure that procedures and standards are followed by the software development team

Quality management should be separate from project management to ensure independence

Quality management and software development

Software development process

D1

D2

D3

D4

D5

Quality management process

Standards and procedures

Quality plan

Quality review reports

ISO 9000
International set ofstandards for quality management Applicable to a range of organisations from manufacturing to service industries ISO 9001 applicable to organisations which design, develop and maintain products ISO 9001 is a generic model of the quality process Must be instantiated for each organisation

ISO 9001
Management res ponsi bi li ty Cont rol of non-conforming product s Handli ng, s torage, packaging and del ivery P urchaser-s uppli ed products P rocess control Ins pect ion and test equipment Cont ract revi ew Document cont rol Internal quali ty audit s Servi ci ng Q ual ity s ys tem Des ign control P urchasi ng P roduct i dentificat ion and traceabi lit y Ins pect ion and test ing Ins pect ion and test st at us Correct ive action Qual ity records Training Statis ti cal t echni ques

ISO 9000 certification

Quality standards and procedures should be documented in an organisational quality manual External body may certify that an organisations quality manual conforms to ISO 9000 standards Customers are, increasingly, demanding that suppliers are ISO 9000 certified

ISO 9000 and quality management

ISO 9000 quality models instantiated as documents

Organization quality manual is used to develop

Organiza tion quality process instantiated as

Project 1 quality plan

Project 2 quality plan

Project 3 quality plan

Project quality mana gement

Supports

Quality assurance and standards

Standards are the key to effective quality management They may be international, national, organizational or project standards Product standards define characteristics that all components should exhibit e.g. a common programming style Process standards define how the software process should be enacted

Importance of standards
Encapsulation of best practice- avoids repetition of past mistakes Framework for quality assurance process - it involves checking standard compliance Provide continuity - new staff can understand the organisation by understand the standards applied

Product and process standards

Product s tandards Des ign review form Document naming st andards P rocedure header format Ada programmi ng s tyle s tandard P roject plan format Change reques t form Proces s s tandards Des ign review conduct Submis si on of document s t o CM Versi on rel ease process P roject plan approval proces s Change control proces s Tes t recording process

Problems with standards

Not seen as relevant and up-to-date by software engineers Involve too much bureaucratic form filling Unsupported by software tools so tedious manual work is involved to maintain standards

Standards development
Involve practitioners in development. Engineers should understand the rationale underlying a standard Review standards and their usage regularly. Standards can quickly become outdated and this reduces their credibility amongst practitioners Detailed standards should have associated tool support. Excessive clerical work is the most significant complaint against standards

Documentation standards
Particularly important - documents are the tangible manifestation of the software Documentation process standards
How documents should be developed, validated and maintained

Document standards
Concerned with document contents, structure, and appearance

Document interchange standards

How documents are stored and interchanged between different documentation systems

Documentation process
Create initial draft Stage 1: Creation Review draft Incorporate review comments Approved document Re-draft document

Proofread text Stage 2: Polishing

Produce final draft Approved document

Check final dr aft

Layout text Stage 3: Pr oduction

Review layout

Produce print masters

Print copies

Document standards
Document identification standards
How documents are uniquely identified

Document structure standards

Standard structure for project documents

Document presentation standards

Define fonts and styles, use of logos, etc.

Document update standards

Define how changes from previous versions are reflected in a document

Document interchange standards

Documents are produced using different systems and on different computers Interchange standards allow electronic documents to be exchanged, mailed, etc. Need for archiving. The lifetime of word processing systems may be much less than the lifetime of the software being documented XML is an emerging standard for document interchange which will be widely supported in future

Process and product quality

The quality of a developed product is influenced by the quality of the production process Particularly important in software development as some product quality attributes are hard to assess However, there is a very complex and poorly understood between software processes and product quality

Process-based quality
Straightforward link between process and product in manufactured goods More complex for software because:
The application of individual skills and experience is particularly imporant in software development External factors such as the novelty of an application or the need for an accelerated development schedule may impair product quality

Care must be taken not to impose inappropriate process standards

Process-based quality
De velop product Assess product quality

Define process

Improve process

No

Quality OK

Yes

Standar dize process

Practical process quality

Define process standards such as how reviews should be conducted, configuration management, etc. Monitor the development process to ensure that standards are being followed Report on the process to project management and software procurer

Quality planning
A quality plan sets out the desired product qualities and how these are assessed and define the most significant quality attributes It should define the quality assessment process It should set out which organisational standards should be applied and, if necessary, define new standards

Quality plan structure

Product introduction Product plans Process descriptions Quality goals Risks and risk management Quality plans should be short, succinct documents
If they are too long, no-one will read them

Software quality attributes

Safety Securit y Rel iabi li ty Res il ience Robust ness

Unders tandabi lit y Tes tabi li ty Adaptabi li ty Modulari ty Complexi ty

P ortabi li ty Usabili ty Reus abil ity Effi ci ency Learnabi lit y

Quality control
Checking the software development process to ensure that procedures and standards are being followed Two approaches to quality control
Quality reviews Automated software assessment and software measurement

Quality reviews
The principal method of validating the quality of a process or of a product Group examined part or all of a process or system and its documentation to find potential problems There are different types of review with different objectives
Inspections for defect removal (product) Reviews for progress assessment(product and process) Quality reviews (product and standards)

Types of review
Review type Des ign or ins pect ions Pri ncipal purpos e program To detect det ail ed errors i n the desi gn or code and to check whet her s tandards have been followed. The review shoul d be dri ven by a checkl is t of poss ible errors. P rogres s revi ews To provide information for management about t he overall progres s of t he project . Thi s is both a process and a product review and i s concerned wit h cost s, plans and s chedules. Qual ity reviews To carry outa technical anal ysi s of product component s or document at ion find fault s to or mis matches bet ween the s pecifi cati on and t he des ign, code or documentat ion. It may also be concerned wi th broader quali ty is sues s uch as adherence t o st andards and other quali ty at tribut es .

Quality reviews
A group of people carefully examine part or all of a software system and its associated documentation. Code, designs, specifications, test plans, standards, etc. can all be reviewed. Software or documents may be 'signed off' at a review which signifies that progress to the next development stage has been approved by management.

The review process

Select review team Arr ange place and time Distribute documents Hold review

Complete review forms

Review functions
Quality function - they are part of the general quality management process Project management function - they provide information for project managers Training and communication function product knowledge is passed between development team members

Quality reviews
Objective is the discovery of system defects and inconsistencies Any documents produced in the process may be reviewed Review teams should be relatively small and reviews should be fairly short Review should be recorded and records maintained

Review results
Comments made during the review should be classified.
No action. No change to the software or documentation is required. Refer for repair. Designer or programmer should correct an identified fault. Reconsider overall design. The problem identified in the review impacts other parts of the design. Some overall judgement must be made about the most cost-effective way of solving the problem.

Requirements and specification errors may have to be referred to the client.

Software measurement and metrics

Software measurement is concerned with deriving a numeric value for an attribute of a software product or process This allows for objective comparisons between techniques and processes Although some companies have introduced measurment programmes, the systematic use of measurement is still uncommon There are few standards in this area

Software metric
Any type of measurement which relates to a software system, process or related documentation
Lines of code in a program, the Fog index, number of person-days required to develop a component

Allow the software and the software process to be quantified Measures of the software process or product May be used to predict product attributes or to control the software process

Predictor and control metrics

Software process Software product

Control measurements

Predictor measurements

Management decisions

Metrics assumptions
A software property can be measured The relationship exists between what we can measure and what we want to know This relationship has been formalized and validated It may be difficult to relate what can be measured to desirable quality attributes

Internal and external attributes

Number of procedur e par ameters Maintainability Cyclomatic complexity Reliability Program size in lines of code Portability Number of error messages Usability Length of user manual

The measurement process

A software measurement process may be part of a quality control process Data collected during this process should be maintained as an organisational resource Once a measurement database has been established, comparisons across projects become possible

Product measurement process

Choose measurements to be made Select components to be assessed Measure component char acteristics Identify anomalous measurements Analyse anomalous components

Data collection
A metrics programme should be based on a set of product and process data Data should be collected immediately (not in retrospect) and, if possible, automatically Three types of automatic data collection
Static product analysis Dynamic product analysis Process data collation

Automated data collection

Instrumented software system

Usage data

Fault data

Data accuracy
Dont collect unnecessary data
The questions to be answered should be decided in advance and the required data identified

Tell people why the data is being collected

It should not be part of personnel evaluation

Dont rely on memory

Collect data when it is generated not after a project has finished

Product metrics
A quality metric should be a predictor of product quality Classes of product metric
Dynamic metrics which are collected by measurements made of a program in execution Static metrics which are collected by measurements made of the system representations Dynamic metrics help assess efficiency and reliability; static metrics help assess complexity, understandability and maintainability

Dynamic and static metrics

Dynamic metrics are closely related to software quality attributes
It is relatively easy to measure the response time of a system (performance attribute) or the number of failures (reliability attribute)

Static metrics have an indirect relationship with quality attributes

You need to try and derive a relationship between these metrics and properties such as complexity, understandability and maintainability

Software product metrics

Sof tware metric Fan in/Fan-out Description Fan-in is a measure of the number of functions that call some other function (say X). Fan-out is the number of functions which are called by function X. A high value for fan-in me ans that X is tightly coupled to the rest of t he design and changes to X will have extensive knock-on eff ects. A high value for fan-out suggests that the overall complexity of X m ay be high because of t he comp lexity of the control logic needed to coordinate the called components. This is a measure of the size of a program. Generally, the larger the size of t he code of a program s components, the more comp lex and error-prone that comp onent is likely to be. This is a measure of the control complexity of a program. This control complexity may be related to program understandability. The computation of cyclomatic comp lexity is covered in Chapter 20. This is a measure of the average length of distinct identifiers in a program. The longer the identifiers, the more likely they are to be meaningful and hence the more understandable the program. This is a measure of the depth of nesting of if-stateme nts in a program. Deeply nested if stateme nts are hard to understand and are potentially error-prone. This is a measure of the average length of words and sentences in documents. The higher the value fo r the Fog index, th e more diff icult the document may be to understand.

Length of code Cyclomatic complexity Length of identifiers Depth of conditional nesting Fog index

Object-oriented metrics
O bjectorien ted me tric Depth of inheritance t ree Method fanin/fan-out Weighted methods per class Descri ption This represents t he number of discrete levels in the inheritance t ree where sub-classes inherit attributes and operat ions (methods) from super-classes. The deeper the inheritance t ree, the more complex t he design as, potent ially, many different object classes have to be understood to understand the object classes at the leaves of the tree. This is direct ly related to fan-in and fan-out as described above and means essent ially t he same thing. However, it may be appropriate to make a dist inct ion between calls from ot her methods within the object and calls from external methods. This is the number of methods included in a class we ighted by the complexity of each method. T he refore, a simple method may have a complexity of 1 and a large and complex method a much higher value. The larger the value for this met ric, the more complex the object class. Complex objects are more likely to be more difficult to understand. T hey may not be logically cohesive so cannot be reused effect ively as superclasses in an inheritance t ree. These are the number of operat ions in a super-class wh ich are over-ridden in a sub-class. A high value for this metric indicates that t he super-class used may not be an appropriate parent for the sub-class.

Number of overriding operat ions

Measurement analysis
It is not always obvious what data means
Analysing collected data is very difficult

Professional statisticians should be consulted if available Data analysis must take local circumstances into account

Measurement surprises
Reducing the number of faults in a program leads to an increased number of help desk calls
The program is now thought of as more reliable and so has a wider more diverse market. The percentage of users who call the help desk may have decreased but the total may increase A more reliable system is used in a different way from a system where users work around the faults. This leads to more help desk calls

Key points
Software quality management is concerned with ensuring that software meets its required standards Quality assurance procedures should be documented in an organisational quality manual Software standards are an encapsulation of best practice Reviews are the most widely used approach for assessing software quality

Key points
Software measurement gathers information about both the software process and the software product Product quality metrics should be used to identify potentially problematical components There are no standardised and universally applicable software metrics