Overview

Achieving and maintaining the desired quality standards is essential for software development success. This blog post explores what Software Quality Assessment (SQA) is. This systematic evaluation process provides independent and unbiased analyses of software systems, personnel, and processes.

By assessing various quality attributes—such as communication efficiency, documentation practices, code security, and adherence to organisational standards—SQA aims to identify areas for improvement and mitigate risks.

We will discuss two primary types of assessments: a high-level assessment, which focuses on organisational and process-level issues, and a more complete evaluation, which delves into technical details and testing strategies.

Through these assessments, organisations gain valuable insights into enhancing their software quality, aligning with user expectations, and achieving their business objectives.

What is SQA, and why do I need it?

A quality assessment in software development is a systematic evaluation process that measures and analyses the quality attributes of software technology, people and processes against the expected organisational standards and requirements.

This appraisal examines various aspects, such as the efficiency of communication channels and processes, knowledge distribution, documentation systems, code quality and security, and portability, to ensure the software meets the expected quality criteria.

Quality assessments typically include processes and quality-focused interviews, code reviews, test report checks, metrics analysis, and operation audits to identify impediments, assess compliance with standards, and determine areas for improvement.

The ultimate goal is to provide objective evidence of software quality, mitigate risks, and ensure the final product/service meets user expectations and business objectives.

TAA Assessments

At the TAA, we usually use two types of quality assessments: an initial, more basic assessment, the LSQA, and a more advanced and detailed evaluation, the STQA. However, to maximise the potential for quality improvements, we recommend customising each assessment to fit the characteristics of each team and organisation.

Lean Software Quality Assessment (LQA)

The Lean Quality Assessment is a service that aims to interview at least one person representative from each role involved in the software development process.  

Each interview seeks to gather all the relevant information within the Three-Test Axioms’ scopes, the stakeholders’ needs, test design, and test delivery. The Test Axioms provide an organised context to frame the discussions and explanations for all quality guidelines. This test appraisal methodology brings structure and simplicity to the interview sessions.

This Lean Quality Assessment service aims to uncover major organisational and process-level issues in the Software Development Life Cycle.

From those interviews, we write a report summarising the key aspects that hinder the quality of the software delivered to the end-users. This final report includes proposals to mitigate, differ from, or resolve the quality issues discovered during the assessment.

As the last step, the report is reviewed and discussed with the team, primarily defining a quality improvement plan towards the team’s desired quality state.

Activities:

1. Planning Interviews
2. Conducting Interviews.
3. Review of quality-related documentation. I.e. * examples of requirements definitions
4. Collect documentation samples to back up the * interview’s discussions.

Sample questions:

• How are the quality stakeholders?
• What evidence do they need?
• What are the sources of knowledge available?
• Which test models will be used?
• What is the expected quality standing for your role/team?

Goals:

• Provide an independent and unbiased definition of the Quality situation of the team or organisation.
• Nourish entry-level introductions to the Software Quality concepts and literature.
• Describe the team/organisation’s high-level Q.A. roadmap to achieve the desired quality.

Software Testing Quality Assessment (STQA)

This service goes one step beyond the “Lean Quality Assessment.” The process also starts with the information-gathering phase, similar to the activities described for the LQA. We then invest more energy in analysing the technical details of the testing strategy, testing technologies, test definitions, test implementations, test environments and executions.

This service expands research activities by collecting more technical details about quality-related obstacles. The information collected during those activities is precious. It will support all other decisions about the right quality strategy for the organisation.

To maximise the benefits of this service, we propose more specific technical collaboration sessions with the development team. Within those sessions, we offer ideas and tools to improve culture quality from the first interactions. Thus, while doing this technical assessment, we start disseminating tips, guidelines and quality-related literature to enhance the organisation’s quality culture from day one.

The final report of this STQA will be a more in-depth report regarding the quality problems within processes. It will directly guide the team in resolving the root cause of the quality-related issues and detail the limitations preventing the organisation from reaching higher quality expectations.

Activities:

1. Same as LQA plus the following.
2. Planning technical sessions with team members.
3. Collect technical documentation and code samples for the final report.
4. Complete code analysis where needed to refine quality issues.
5. Introduction to software quality processes and specialised test tooling.

Sample questions:

• What test environments are available to the team?
• What test data is available to the team?
• In what format do the test results need to be presented?
• How often do we need to provide test results?
• How will devs/testers accommodate changes in scope?
• What confidence can we have in test results?

Goals:

• Provide a detailed, independent, and unbiased definition of the software quality of the team or organisation.
• Nourish high-level introductions to the Software Quality concepts and literature.
• Describe a detailed Q.A. roadmap to achieve the desired quality.

Our team operates on a hybrid model, primarily working remotely with on-site collaboration for the final days of the project.

For further details, questions and corrections: Lets connect