Software Quality Assurance (SQA) – An extension of QA!

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) – An extension of QA!

To understand SQA, let us explain QA in brief:

Quality Assurance (QA) is a ‘must’ in every software organisation and it is gaining importance with each passing day. It is not a fashion statement for a software development/testing organisation, and those companies who take it as a fancy term are absolutely wrong. This means if you don’t check for quality in your product in reality, the company will face losses. So, take QA seriously! Many of us mistake QA as testing but in reality this is not so, QA has almost no role to play in testing. To define it best, we can say it is a Quality Control (QC) methodology.

Now, what is SQA?

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is based on the ideas from mainstream of QA. SQA is a planned and systematic pattern of actions required to ensure high quality in software.

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is a process that ensures that developed software meets and complies with defined or standardized quality conditions. SQA is an ongoing process within the software development life cycle (SDLC) that routinely checks the developed software to ensure it meets desired quality measures. SQA is an umbrella activity that is applied throughout the software process.

You can consider SQA essentially the same as QA but with emphasis on specific aspects and the addition of a few techniques appropriate to software development. Here, at the first, special stress is laid on improving the process for software. Studies and survey exemplify that testing finds, at best, 60% of bugs. Any programmer can confirm that there are so many possible permutations in the use of even a simple piece of software that it is impossible to test using a black box (i.e. post-production) outlook. In SQA, the quality of the software is not just constrained to what the user sees but also has an effect on developer’s quality attributes. There are specific techniques promoted in SQA that are based on QA principles. Also, many agile techniques come directly from QA principles.

SQA is reliable as it serves in making sure the development is of high-quality software. SQA practices are implemented in almost all types of software development, irrespective of the underlying software development model being used. SQA incorporates and implements software testing methodologies to test software rather than checking for quality after completion as mentioned above. SQA strategies tests for quality at each stage of development until the software is executed. It makes you feel secured of the product as with SQA, the software development process moves into the next level only when the ongoing stage complies with the required quality standards. It moves with phases one after the other, ensuring quality with each phase. SQA generally works on one or more industry standards that help in building software quality guidelines and implementation strategies. These standards include the ISO 9000, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Six Sigma.

SQA vs. Agile

The only one dissimilarity is SQA lays special stress on getting things right at the first go and on the contrary, Agile rests upon iterative refinement.
Apart from this there are lots of similarities such as customer focus and feedback, empowerment, communication and special stress on improving the development process.