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Quality assurance activities provide a general and integral quality-focused perspective, across all target areas and shared concerns such as maintainability, reliability, security… security etc. It is focused on the delivery of a quality system, based on the established requirements and specification with the stakeholders.
Quality It should be considered early and embedded into requirements, planning, design, costs, internal culture, ethics, managerial approaches and incentives for the team members. It should make sure that the agreed parameters of quality remain in the focus of the development team and are the subject of tracking and evaluation.
Quality assurance should also build assurances and controls for the software and processes that document them and ensure that quality-related claims are satisfied.
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Identify and analyse risks, threats and vulnerabilities: Identification of risks, threats and vulnerabilities is started upfront and regularly reviewed during development for the following aspects of development:
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The identified risks are recorded and tracked through a risk register . It that is shared with the stakeholders, and they are informed about risks that could not be tracked or managed by the team, and they are made responsible for updates on them.
Quality assurance planning
Plan quality assurance activities: Quality assurance activities are planned. The plan is updated, based on the risks identified during the development of the project.
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Identify relevant quality characteristics: Based , based on the risk analysis, identified requirements, quality needs, identified requirements and the actual work process, quality-related characteristics that are relevant for the project are identified.
Quality standards for the produced artifacts are identified (if available) or defined and captured.
Quality assurance verification criteria
Define QA verification criteria: For each requirement and relevant performance or quality characteristic, verification criteria are defined and expressed in a measurable way and made SMART, covering key aspects of all target areas and processes. Verification upon these criteria should ensure that the system is in line with the specifications and requirements that were captured and agreed.
This specific goal relates to the planning and design of criteria, but not to the actual testing of QA parameters. The established criteria may be applied on to software, the team or the environment (e.g. used tools). They may be based on:
- Presence of required elements.
- Adherence of artifacts to predefined standards, norms or associated metrics.
- Meeting functional or compliance requirements.
- Meeting speed, throughput, reliability, resilience, security, adaptability and maintainability requirements.
The quantitative criteria may also become quality indicators. At certain levels, quantitative requirements such as those related to performance also become indications of quality. Similarly, characteristics that are directly linked to quality, such as function or compliance, may be measured with quantitative metrics (e.g. percentage of requirements that were met).
Verification procedures and environments
Set up testing Testing and verification procedures and testing environmentare set up:
- Plans for tests, peer reviews or other verification procedures are established.
- Artifacts subject to review are identified.
- The testing Testing environment is established and maintained.
- Test cases, scenarios and data are designed and developed.
- It is defined how successful or failed verification are distinguished, solutions confirmed and regressions avoided.
- Responsibilities are set and upheld.
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