1. The Role of the Quality Group in
Software Development
By Mr. Fazal Wahab

2. Purpose of Quality Group
 Ranges from testing products to providing information
and expertise about the product and development
process
 Provide knowledge and training:
 Product testing
 Process creation and management
 Toolsets and
 Metrics

3. The Role of Quality Assurance Group
1. The primary activities are to develop and run tests with
the primary emphasis on reporting defects
 This role gives the most tangible and obvious results
 This type of group is doing quality control; acting as a filter
for products to ensure that only product with acceptable
levels of erros are delivered.

4. The Role of Quality Assurance Group
2. To measure the quality of products
- Emphasis on achievement of specific levels of quality.
- Reports on the result of other’s groups’ activities.
- Act in more advisory capacity
- Focus on measuring the quality through product defects.
- Gathering enough data on the product that good quantitative
decisions and predictions can be made.
- A quality level to be achieved before the produce can be released

5. The Role of Quality Assurance Group
3. Concentrate more on the organization’s processes, rather
than the products.
- Assess risks and design process to reduce the risks and
increase the quality.
4. Ensuring that the process is properly defined, measured and
controlled.
5. Provide guidance, training, and assistance in issues relating
to quality throughout the organization.

6. The Role of Quality Assurance Group
 Appropriate selection of SDLC
 Development goes smoothly and good quality practices can be
more easily applied
 When a poor choice is made of the SDLC, the effort by all
members of the organization is increased and the quality
decreased.
 This will force the quality group to act as testers and gate
keepers to avoid release of seriously faulty products.

7. Models for the Quality System
 ISO 900 is a framework for a quality system, rather than
a process methodology or prescription for the software
organization’s charter or function.
 The quality system is the set of monitors and controls
applied to processes and methodologies to ensure that it
is working, rather than testing of the product itself to see
if it works.

8. Models for the Quality System
 CMM is not suggesting:
 what the right process is?
 who should do what?
 How things should be done?
 The models don’t prescribe specific techniques or
methods.
 Models describe how the process must be defined,
controlled and improved.

9. Software Quality Group Activities
 Promote and facilitate QA (training) and make sure that QA is happening
inside each work product for activities involved in design, development
enhancement, distribution, support and maintenance of the products.
 Make the developers aware that the software they write should be easily
installed, maintained, and reliable.
 Make sure QA information reaches all members of the project.
 Procedures and standards monitoring (adherence to)
 Verification and validation (V&V) monitoring and
 Testing monitoring

10. Software Quality Group Activities
 Deliveries monitoring: Input and output from each step are
conforming to the required quality requirements – Delay,
quality criteria, completeness etc.
 Configuration management monitoring
 Non-conformance reporting and corrective action monitoring
 Quality indicators set up and monitoring
 Continuous improvement proposals of the QA process
 Report on Work Products QA activities