Software Quality

This course is a series of Web-based training modules that teach you about topics critical to efficient development of high-quality software and techniques you can use to improve software quality.

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This course includes:

1. Introduction to Software Quality: This module discusses basic concepts about quality, including definitions of quality, a description of quality management systems and standards, and an overview of how to measure quality.
2. Software Lifecycle and Quality: This module discusses the definition of software development and that software development involves certain essential activities. You will also learn about software development processes, or process models, each of which manages these activities differently.
3. Measuring Software Quality: This module discusses general software metrics as well as metrics specific to quality. You will learn about measuring the intrinsic quality of a product through defect tracking, and measuring the customer view of quality through surveys. You will also be introduced to in-process quality metrics, or quality predictive indicators (QPIs). We will discuss how you measure quality in the maintenance phase, including measuring the customer experience as well as the quality of the product after it is in the field. Another topic covered is measuring how effectively your processes and practices are removing defects, or the defect removal efficiency (DRE).
4. The Whole Plan Model: This module describes a software tool called the Whole Plan Model. Developed by the Quality Software Engineering group at IBM, it is designed to help you visualize the positive impact of adding early defect removal practices to your software development process. You will learn about the potential impact of early defect removal practices on a product's quality, resources, and schedule, and you will see examples from the tool that show the impact. You will also learn how to operate the tool.
5. The Effort/Outcome Model: This module decribes one method of measuring quality both in process and as an overall project indicator. Called the Effort/Outcome model, this method uses two types of indicators to provide a fuller picture of the product's quality than either indicator alone would. One metric is an effort indicator which tells you about how effective the effort is. The other is an outcome indicator, which is a result of an activity, such as how many defects were found. You will learn not only about the concepts involved but how to apply the effort/outcome model to test, software inspections, and system stress tests.
6. The QPI Process: This module discusses Quality Predictive Indicators (QPIs). These are indicators that you use, while a product is still under development, to determine whether or not you will meet your quality goals.
7. Software Quality Management: Throughout this series, we have talked about various aspects of quality, including what it is, how to measure it, and strategies for producing a better quality software product. In this module, we'll look at how to bring these elements together to define a plan for managing quality at the organization level and at the project level. Which metrics will you use? What are your priorities? How do you balance quality against factors such as cost and schedule? These topics are covered in this module.
8. Effective Practices for Requirements and Design: This module discusses practices that teams can use to improve the quality of their requirements and design efforts. You will learn about how requirements are gathered and how use cases improve the quality of your requirements. You will learn about practices your team can use to improve the quality of the software designs. You will also be introduced to standards your team can use to identify security requirements and to assess the security of the design. You will learn how software inspections can be used to remove defects in requirements and design documents. We will discuss criteria you can use to measure the effectiveness of your team's inspection process.
9. Effective Practices for Implementation and Test: This module discusses practices that teams can use to improve the quality of their coding and test efforts. You will learn about how the use of static analysis, inspections, and unit test improve the quality of the code produced during the implementation activities of your project. You will also be introduced to metrics that you can use to measure the effectiveness of these practices. We will discuss the focus areas for functional and system verification testing, as well as the entry and exit criteria for inspecting test plans, test cases, and tests. Another topic covered is in-process measures you can use to assess progress in implementing and testing your solution.
10. Effective Practices for Quality Analysis: This module discusses several effective practices regarding quality analysis and management for software development.