Title:

Preparation and presentation of the Software Quality Assurance Course

Client:

ERA / Telecom Modus Ltd.

Description:

A 2-day course on Software Quality Assurance was developed specifically for ERA/Telecom Modus Ltd to train their software development teams. This course was a combination of presented materials plus seven team exercises.

The aim of the course was: To provide an appreciation of how Quality Assurance can be used to improve the final quality of a system.

To provide this appreciation the objectives were to show:

• The relationship between international standards and every-day practises
• The advantages of using quality assurance & quality control
• How to choose the right 'horse' for the 'course'
• How to improve the quality of your systems development
• How to build the right team to provide the best quality.

The detailed syllabus for the 2-day course was:

1 Software Life-cycles and Quality Assurance

• Waterfall, spiral and evolutionary prototyping
• Requirements analysis, validation and verification
• Functional specification and system architecture
• Detailed design, coding and configuration control
• Testing, build tests, integration, certification and acceptance
• Planning, costing and maintenance        

2 Implementing Software Quality Assurance

• Setting up the QA system, scaling, expected benefits/difficulties
• Start-to-finish documentation, consistency and spotting problems
• Requirements and the user, areas of confusion and uncertainty
• Design walk-through, programming psychology
• Code for testability, test environments, reliability analysis
• Integration, locating and identifying problems        

3 Software Methodologies

• Methodologies overview, process, data and event driven
• Types of design paradigm, procedural, object oriented, etc.
• Review of techniques, Yourdon, SSADM, DFD, OOD, UML, Z etc.
• HCI design problems, data in and data out
• Relevance of formal methods, mixed design approaches
• Automated design tools and CASE, software through pictures.

4 Methodologies and Quality Assurance

• Design for testability, design for maintainability
• Changes, configuration control and impact analysis
• Metrics (size vs. functionality), accuracy and meaning
• Selecting the team, allocating resources, people management
• Maintenance, reuse and re-engineering, tools and approaches
• When to start again, feed-back of experience, problem prediction.

The exercises were:

1. What is quality assurance?
2. Requirements definition
3. Managing a crisis
4. Software effort estimation
5. Structure chart based coding
6. Code walk-through & testing
7. Why projects fail
8. Test plans
9. Improving quality at ERA.

Deliverables:

The set of deliverables for the course were:

• Study Guide
• Presentation Materials
• Exercise Sheets and Model Answers
• Course Evaluation Sheets

Partners:

None.

Timeline:

1997-2001 (2-day course given 10 times in the period)

Read more:

More information is available on:

• Recommended reading list
• Example exercise (Test Plans)
• Example presentation materials
• Example material from the Study Guide