Sommerville-Software-Engineering-10ed

710 Chapter 24 ■ Quality management
ISO 9001
quality models
instantiated as
Organization
quality manual
documents
Organization
quality process
is used to develop
instantiated as
Project 1
quality plan
Project 2
quality plan
Project 3
quality plan
Project quality
management
Figure 24.6 ISO 9001
and quality
management
Supports
uncertified companies. The ISO 9001 standard focuses on ensuring that the organization
has quality management procedures in place and that it follows these procedures.
There is no guarantee that ISO 9001 certified companies use the best software
development practices or that their processes lead to high-quality software.
The ISO 9001 certification is inadequate, in my view, because it defines quality
to be the conformance to standards. It takes no account of quality as experienced by
users of the software. For example, a company could define test coverage standards
specifying that all methods in objects must be called at least once. Unfortunately,
this standard can be met by incomplete software testing that does not include tests
with different method parameters. As long as the defined testing procedures are followed
and test records are maintained, the company could be ISO 9001 certified.
24.3 Reviews and inspections
Reviews and inspections are quality assurance activities that check the quality of
project deliverables. This involves checking the software, its documentation, and
records of the process to discover errors and omissions as well as standards violations.
As I explained in Chapter 8, reviews and inspections are used alongside program
testing as part of the general process of software verification and validation.
During a review, several people examine the software and its associated documentation,
looking for potential problems and nonconformance with standards. The
review team makes informed judgments about the level of quality of the software or
project documents. Project managers may then use these assessments to make planning
decisions and allocate resources to the development process.
Quality reviews are based on documents that have been produced during the software
development process. As well as software specifications, designs, code, process
models, test plans, configuration management procedures, process standards,