What is Software Quality Management?

Software Quality Management ensures that the required level of quality is achieved by
submitting improvements to the product development process. SQA aims to develop a culture
within the team and it is seen as everyone's responsibility.

Software Quality management should be independent of project management to ensure

• Quality Assurance - QA aims at developing Organizational procedures and standards

• Quality Planning - Select applicable procedures and standards for a particular project
and modify as required to develop a quality plan.
• Quality Control - Ensure that best practices and standards are followed by the
software development team to produce quality products.

Software Quality
• Software quality product is defined in term of its fitness of purpose. That is, a quality
product does precisely what the users want it to do. For software products, the fitness of
use is generally explained in terms of satisfaction of the requirements laid down in the SRS
document. Although "fitness of purpose" is a satisfactory interpretation of quality for many
devices such as a car, a table fan, a grinding machine, etc.for software products, "fitness of
purpose" is not a wholly satisfactory definition of quality.
• Example: Consider a functionally correct software product. That is, it performs all tasks
as specified in the SRS document. But, has an almost unusable user interface. Even though
it may be functionally right, we cannot consider it to be a quality product.
• The modern view of a quality associated with a software product several quality
methods such as the following:
• Portability: A software device is said to be portable, if it can be freely made to work in
various operating system environments, in multiple machines, with other software
products, etc.
• Usability: A software product has better usability if various categories of users can easily
invoke the functions of the product.
• Reusability: A software product has excellent reusability if different modules of the
product can quickly be reused to develop new products.
• Correctness: A software product is correct if various requirements as specified in the SRS
document have been correctly implemented.
• Maintainability: A software product is maintainable if bugs can be easily corrected as and
when they show up, new tasks can be easily added to the product, and the functionalities
of the product can be easily modified, etc.
• Software Quality Management System
• A quality management system is the principal methods used by organizations to provide
that the products they develop have the desired quality.
• A quality system subsists of the following:
• Managerial Structure and Individual
Responsibilities: A quality system is the responsibility of the organization as a whole.
However, every organization has a sever quality department to perform various quality
system activities. The quality system of an arrangement should have the support of the top
management. Without help for the quality system at a high level in a company, some
members of staff will take the quality system seriously.
• Quality System Activities: The quality system activities encompass the following:
• Auditing of projects
• Review of the quality system
• Development of standards, methods, and guidelines, etc.
• Production of documents for the top management summarizing the effectiveness of the
quality system in the organization.
• Evolution of Quality Management System
• Quality systems have increasingly evolved over the last five decades. Before World War
II, the usual function to produce quality products was to inspect the finished products to
remove defective devices. Since that time, quality systems of organizations have undergone
through four steps of evolution, as shown in the fig. The first product inspection task gave
method to quality control (QC).
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• Quality control target not only on detecting the defective devices and removes them but
also on determining the causes behind the defects. Thus, quality control aims at correcting
the reasons for bugs and not just rejecting the products. The next breakthrough in quality
methods was the development of quality assurance methods.
• The primary premise of modern quality assurance is that if an organization's processes are
proper and are followed rigorously, then the products are obligated to be of good quality.
The new quality functions include guidance for recognizing, defining, analyzing, and
improving the production process.
• Total quality management (TQM) advocates that the procedure followed by an organization
must be continuously improved through process measurements. TQM goes stages further
than quality assurance and aims at frequently process improvement. TQM goes beyond
documenting steps to optimizing them through a redesign. A term linked to TQM is
Business Process Reengineering (BPR).
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• BPR aims at reengineering the method business is carried out in an organization. From the
above conversation, it can be stated that over the years, the quality paradigm has changed
from product assurance to process assurance, as shown in fig.
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