SQA - A PROACTIVE APPROACH TO ASSURING SOFTWARE QUALITY

As AT&T participates in increasingly competitive global markets, the need to provide consistently high-quality software products becomes more crucial. Use of the Best Current Practices (BCP) guide is a key element of the AT&T Bell Laboratories approach to world-class quality. Software quality assurance (SQA) is a function that helps product-development organizations proactively measure, utilize, and improve development processes in order to produce high-quality software. The goals of SQA are to: Facilitate the establishment of process standards, Achieve the desired level of product quality, Assess compliance with established standards and processes, Identify instances of noncompliance for corrective action, and Take corrective action as required. This paper presents the essential elements of an SQA function, and summarizes industry and AT&T experiences with SQA. The paper also discusses approaches for customizing SQA to differently sized projects and various phases of the software-development process.