| Today software plays a critical role in various aspects of human life, from rockets to health care. Not surprisingly, a number of organizations have sprung up in order to meet this need for software. Among these are software organizations that comprise of less than ten people which we term small organizations. Although these small organizations have few resources in terms of time, money and people, they often develop leading edge software for new application domains or do important subcontracting work for larger companies. In order to gain acceptability in the marketplace for their products or to obtain contracts from the larger companies, it is necessary for them to produce high quality software in the shortest possible time. A number of standards have been proposed in order to assess and improve an organization's software and process quality. But these standards are geared towards large organizations and are hence too complex for small organizations. The main goal of this thesis is to address this deficiency.;There are three main contributions of this thesis. First, an assessment of a particular small software company, NewCo, is performed to identify the quality issues of small software organizations. Second, a Quality Framework that is affordable, effective, scalable, usable and aids in out-sourcing of quality is proposed. The quality framework provides support for performing quality activities in a small software organization. Third, the quality framework is prototyped using a semi-automated tool developed as part of this thesis work in order to help NewCo perform quality activities. |
