Customer Oriented Software Quality Assurance

An outstanding, albeit brief, introduction to software QA. For those who are new to the field, it is a quick way to get started.

After working in IT for over a decade, one of the most interesting things I have found is how few people know what quality assurance is. Mr. Ginac has provided us with a simple and sound book on quality assurance that can help IT professionals to overcome some of these misconceptions. Its value can be seen on several fronts. First of all, its emphasis on the customer is refreshing, and is central to the focus of quality assurance. Second, its discourse is well rounded, illustrating that quality assurance is more broad in its focus than test planning and execution. In the latter point, it illustrates how metrics fit into the picture of quality assurance, and how QA is concerned with the entire process of developing software, from problem identification to solution delivery.Mr. Ginac also touches on SEI's CMM, ISO 9000, and other topics of interest to the would-be quality professional. The thing that I hope that this book will do is to whet the reader's apetite for more on the topics discussed. As my title suggests, this book only touches the surface of a vast and inviting ocean of knowledge in this field. As such, I recommend it for the beinning to intermediate quality professional and for anyone in the IT field who wants to know what QA is.

This information-packed book taught me more about software quality from a service delivery point of view than I thought possible. I knew before reading it that it was not a typical SQA book, thanks to the previous reviews and a colleague's recommendation, so my expectations were set accordingly.What I liked most about the book is the consistent focus on metrics that are meaningful to business users. While I was aware of many of the quality attributes discussed, I learned a few new ones to which I can apply to measuring the quality of applications that are delivered to end users. If you are unfamiliar with the term "quality attribute" it is a term that also means "desirable characteristic", and can be expressed as a technical characteristic (function or feature) or a service-oriented characteristic (quantified reliability, mean time between failures, etc.).Another thing that make this book valuable to me is part that focused on developing questionnaires and eliciting from end users what they deemed to be quality attributes. This goes a long way towards aligning the IT/IS service delivery function to actual business requirements (instead of what we perceive to be business requirements - too often there is a wide chasm separating the two views). Moreover, extending the author's approach by communicating these quality attributes backwards into the application delivery organization that is responsible for developing applications, the ability of IT/IS to align to business requirements is further strengthened. Bear in mind that the flow down of quality attributes does not have to go to an internal development organization. Applications delivery also encompasses software vendors and consultants doing on- or off-site programming, as well as service bureaus and ASPs (application service providers). In the case of external sources of applications, the quality attributes are invaluable--no, essential--to the RFP, negotiating and contract stages of procuring and supporting the application. The value is that quality attributes are an objective way of expressing requirements that can be measured.This book is must-reading for anyone who provides application support, including tier-2 support, business analysts and production services management. Although it is less than 210 pages in length, it contains a wealth of information that will lead to ideas and strategies for delivering better service and for more closely aligning IT/IS to the business. The only thing I did not like about the book is the "Software Quality Assurance" part of the title. Had I not been fortunate enough to have a friend who practically insisted that I read this book I would have never considered this gem. It rates five big stars by living up to the "customer-oriented" part of the title and for opening my eyes to some important concepts.

I agree with the previous reviewer that this book is a basic primer on software quality assurance. From the perspective of a software quality assurance practitioner I would have rated this book at 3 stars and moved on.However, this book has much to offer to four domains outside of SQA:(1) Developers - most developers are woefully unaware of the basics of SQA. They have no idea of the much larger picture and how they fit into the scheme of things in a process that is designed to deliver a quality software product. In fairness to developers they have a daunting task just keeping up with the techniques and technologies that characterize their domain. What this book will do for a developer, particularly one who is working within the context of Extreme Programming (XP), is to provide a foundation for software quality. It also provides an awareness of SEI's capability maturity model (CMM), about which most developers outside of defense-related software organizations probably don't know much. It also gives a good overview of ISO 9000-3 (also known as TickIT). (2) Testers - software testing and SQA are two vastly different functions. Testing is done to verify and validate software or to break it. In the verification and validation stage testers find the answer to: Did we build the right thing? Did we build it right? This is done in the user acceptance/product test environment. Testers try to break software in the staging/pre-production environment. In this respect testers are the natural enemy of developers. Contrast this with SQA - this function is a process and oversight function that is usually performed at the program management office (PMO) or software engineering process group level. In an ideal world SQA concerns themselves with developing and implementing processes that minimize defects and rework. They work with trends, statistics and other quantitative methods and attempt to answer questions such as: Where in the development life cycle did the defect get introduced? What can we do to the process to prevent it from happening again? This book exposes testers to a brave new world called SQA and shows how they fit into the much larger picture of delivering quality.(3) Production Services (a.k.a, production support, application support, and a plethora of other names) - this group is on the front line and is comprised of a number of functions, all of which would benefit from this book. The help desk staff will have a clear idea of quality indicators to measure that mean something to both the business and the applications delivery team. For example, while defect density metrics may mean something to the SQA group, it is of less concern to the help desk. On the other hand, the help desk (and tier 2 application support) would find metrics such as defect removal efficiency to me a useful measure. This metric is the ratio of defects found in testing and defects discovered production. This does three things: shows how effective the testing fu