Software Quality: An overview from the perspective of total quality management by Kan, Basili, Shapi

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Software Quality An overview from the
perspective of total quality management by Kan,
Basili, Shapiro

• General Quality
• necessary condition but not sufficient for
  todays world market
• multidimensional concept involving
• entity of interest, view of that entity, quality
  attributes of that entity
• Multiple definitions
• a) conformance to requirements (Crosby) and
• b) fitness for use (Juran)
• Product Quality
• two levels
• small q - at product level
• Defect rate (e.g. use bugs/kloc metric)
• Reliability (e.g. use meantime-to-failure
  metric)
• big Q - product level PLUS customer satisfaction
  level
• quality loop concept
• customer wants
• requirements
• product design and implementation according to
  requirements
• distribute and service the product
• customer satisfaction

this is non-trivial to do
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Software Quality (cont.)

• 3. Process Quality
• Ensuring that each intermediate product resulting
  from the steps of development process is of good
  quality and satisfies the internal customers who
  have to perform the next step.
• Ensuring that the methodology, tools, and
  technologies employed for the process are under
  control and are improving.
• ---- Need metrics for this ?---

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Total Quality Management (TQM)

• A style of management that creates an
  organizational culture for improvement of
• product
• process
• service
• to achieve success through customer satisfaction
• Key elements are
• Customer focus
• Process
• Human Culture
• Measurements
• Several Organizational frameworks have been
  proposed to improve quality
• Plan-Do-Check-Act (improving/optimizing a
  process)
• Quality Improvement Paradigm/Experience Factory
  (building cont. improving org.)
• SEI Capability Maturity Model (staged process
  improvement)
• Lean Enterprise Management (valued added
  process and development)

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1. Customer Focus

• Understanding the customers wants and needs is a
  key element for software TQM
• Early in the development phase - verify
  requirements and early feedback
• rapid throwaway prototyping
• iterative enhancement
• evolutionary development
• Late in the development phase controlled
  feedback
• customer beta test
• customer burn-in for early customers

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2. Process, Technology, and Development

• Defect Prevention Process
• causal analysis
• action team
• (action kick off meetings)
• action tracking
• Reviews and Inspections
• Formal Methods
• Improvements in Design Paradigms (e.g. OO)
• Programming Languages
• Development Platforms, Libraries, Change Control
  and Middleware (Screen -Logic DataBase M-V-C)
• Software Reuse

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3. Human Culture

• Organizational Participation (total)
• Management commitment and leadership
• Professional buy-in and empowerment
• customer interaction (my addition for emphasis)
• Integrated Operational Approach
• project (schedule/resource/function perspective)
• process
• quality
• Communication is a huge factor for human culture

Many software projects are group activities --
social, psychological, organizational

skills are relatively important
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4. Data, Measurement, and Model

• Collecting data and performing measurements are
  absolutely necessary
• well defined metrics (a necessary pre-req.)
• Goal/Question/Metric (GQM)
• models are needed
• reliability models
• quality models (may be used for both development
  and service)
• complexity models
• service models (my addition)
• must have means to collect and record