Exploring Reference Model Of Software Quality Assurance

Software development has been the bottleneck hindering the widely application of computer since computer invented. At the software crisis arose in 1960's, people have been aware that software industry should be inspired by other industry's engineering. And in 1968, at the working conference organized by NATO, it was the first time to propose the conception of software engineering to develop software.There are two kinds of assurance technology in software quality: after-control and fore-control. After-control is to use debugging, testing, reexamining and other technology methods to avoid quality defects, finding defects are its main form. Fore-control is to control quality defects through process standardization and management methods, such as CMM and ISO, prevention is its main form. There are some limitations in after-control, because we only know what to do rather than how to do though the standards. Furthermore, fore-prevention is more significant than after-action in the quality assurance. So, the quality assurance of software should build the system, which focuses on customer's satisfaction and could prevent troubles in advance.The software quality has been increasingly emphasized and there are some standards and process models (such as waterfall model, RUP model, CMM and so on), which are aim for insuring quality, guiding software development. However, they just provide a principle guideline, and people generally find the lack of suitable tools in software quality assurance. Thereby, following the thread suggested by software engineering and revelation derived by SCOR model, we apply theassurance technologies in quality control and management ideas such as QFD and FMEA to the software product, which have been widely used in manufacture quality area.After studying the management mode of best practices, we explore a reference model of software quality assurance (SQuAReModel) , which represents as a management process of software quality using tools QFD, FMEA and GQM alternately. This model is used to direct the realization and quality assurance in each phase of software development. And it is focusing on customer's demand, improving efficiency, getting ride of drawback and waste. It analyzes the process by measuring and setting the goal. So the quality control in each phase is well-founded.Under the guidance of assurance standard of software quality (such asCMM) and the direction of software develop process (suchasRUP) , the (SQuAReModel) concerns on improving the process by transformation, diagnosis and metric. It is a diagnosis tool in the process improvement. It could accurately exchange the information of possible problems, objectively evaluate the quality performance and make the refine software. This reference model includes a series of process definition, measuring index and comparing benchmarks to help improving the process of software quality assurance, finding roadmap between software quality and customer demand, quality standards and technology.