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State of the art in software quality assurance

Published: 04 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

The authors present a summary of their understanding of the publications that appeared in the computing literature during the last five-year period, with the word quality as part of their title and dealing with some or other aspects of software quality assurance. Specifically, the summary covers the following eight sub-topics, viz., (i) quality models; (ii) timely QA feedback; (iii) quantitative approaches to predicting software quality and the effectiveness of software QA; (iv) optimal choice of QA methods; (v) design level QA; (vi) impact of parallel development options on software quality; (vii) continued QA efforts even after the operational deployment of the software product; and (viii) use of CASE tools and perceived value for QA at NASA JPL. This digest also includes summaries of three short papers describing ongoing research on (i) prioritizing QA efforts; (ii) QA in an Agile development context; and (iii) presenting the software quality status to stakeholders during development. Major trends observed in the summary pertain to (i) continuing software QA efforts even after the operational deployment of the software product, which may also be pertinent to the proliferation of mobile applications; (ii) presenting the current software quality status to different stakeholders using concise sets of software metrics; and (iii) the effectiveness of hybrid approach of tool use combined with expert judgment for software QA. The emphasis on software QA activities spreading throughout the software product life cycle, from its beginning to end, is clearly observed in the reviewed literature.

References

[1]
Yasutaka Kamei, Emad Shihab, Bran Adams, et al., 2013, A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Just-in-Time Quality Assurance, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 39, No. 6, June 2013, pp 757--773, IEEE http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2012.70
[2]
Martin Brandtner, 2013, Fostering Software Quality Assessment, ICSE 2013, San Francisco, CA, USA, Doctoral Symposium, pp 1393--1396; IEEE http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606725
[3]
Ganesh Samarthyam, Girish Suryanarayana, Tushar Sharma, et al., 2013, MIDAS: A Design Quality Assessment Method for Industrial Software, ICSE 2013, San Francisco, CA, USA, Software Engineering in Practice, pp 911--920; IEEE http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606640
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Denise Shigeta, Dan Port, Allan P. Nitora, Joel Wilf, 2013, Tool Use Within NASA Software Quality Assurance, 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp 4938--4947; IEEE http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2013.554
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Tilmann Hampp, 2012, A Cost-Benefit Model for Software Quality Assurance Activities, PROMISE '12, September 21-22, 2012, Lund, Sweden, pp 99--108; ACM DL http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2365324.2365337
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Johannes Neubauer, B. Steffen, D. Bauer, et al., 2012, Automated Continuous Quality Assurance, FormSERA 2012, Zurich, Switzerland, pp 37--43; IEEE http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/FormSERA.2012.6229787
[9]
Sonali Bhasin, 2012, Quality Assurance in Agile -- A study towards achieving excellence, Agile India 2012, pp 64--67; IEEE http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/AgileIndia.2012.18
[10]
Emad Shihab, 2011, Pragmatic Prioritization of Software Quality Assurance Efforts, ICSE '11, May 21-28, 2011, Waikiki, Honolulu, HI, USA, pp 1106--1109; ACM DL http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1985793.1986007
[11]
Klaus Lochmann, Andreas Goeb, 2011, A Unifying Model for Software Quality, WoSQ'11, September 4, 2011, Szeged, Hungary, pp 3--10; ACM DL http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2024587.2024591
[12]
Dan Port, Joel Wilf, 2011, A Study on the Perceived Value of Software Quality Assurance at JPL, Proceedings of the 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2011; IEEE http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2011.34
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Christian Murphy, G. Kaiser, I. Vo, M. Chu, 2009, Quality Assurance of Software Applications Using the In Vivo Testing Approach, International Conference on Software Testing Verification and Validation, pp 111--120; IEEE http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICST.2009.18
[15]
Omar Alshathry, H. Janicke, H. Zedan, A. Alhussain, 2009, Quantitative Quality Assurance Approach, International Conference on New Trends in Information and Service Science, pp 405--408; IEEE http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/NISS.2009.114
[16]
Michael Kläs, S. Wagner, M. Pizka, et al., 2009, A Framework for the Balanced Optimization of Quality Assurance Strategies Focusing on Small and Medium Sized Enterprises, 35th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, pp 335--342; IEEE http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362631
[17]
Michael Kläs, H. Nakao, F. Elberzhager, J. Munch, 2008, Predicting Defect Content and Quality Assurance Effectiveness by Combining Expert Judgment and Defect Data - A Case Study, 19th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, pp 17--26; IEEE http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE.2008.43
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F. Deissenboeck, S. Wagner, M. Pizka, et al., 2007, An Activity-Based Quality Model for Maintainability., In Proc. 23rd Int. Conf. on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2007), IEEE CS Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362631
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Jacobs J, Jan van Moll, Rob Kusters, et al., 2007, Identification of factors that influence defect injection and detection in development of software intensive products, Inf. Softw. Technol., vol. 49, no. 7, pp. 774--789. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2006.09.002
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[23]
S. H. Kan, 2003, Metrics and Models in Software Quality Engineering, Addison Wesley.
[24]
R. C. Martin, 2000, Design principles and design patterns, Object Mentor.
[25]
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Cited By

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  • (2022)Quantitative Quality Score for SoftwareProceedings of the 15th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference10.1145/3511430.3511457(1-5)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2022
  • (2021)Framework to Manage Software Quality on IIoT AppsIOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering10.1088/1757-899X/1154/1/0120061154:1(012006)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2021

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes  Volume 39, Issue 3
May 2014
73 pages
ISSN:0163-5948
DOI:10.1145/2597716
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 June 2014
Published in SIGSOFT Volume 39, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. design quality
  2. effect of branching
  3. just-in-time approach
  4. ongoing research
  5. perceived value
  6. quality assurance
  7. quality models
  8. quantitative approach
  9. real-life testing
  10. tool use

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View all
  • (2022)Quantitative Quality Score for SoftwareProceedings of the 15th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference10.1145/3511430.3511457(1-5)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2022
  • (2021)Framework to Manage Software Quality on IIoT AppsIOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering10.1088/1757-899X/1154/1/0120061154:1(012006)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2021

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