Software Quality Assurance Plan: Setting Quality Assurance Checkpoints within the Project Life Cycle and System Development Life Cycle

Abstract

Software Quality Assurance Plan (SQAP) is an effort driven activity which consists a set of documentation of procedures, workflows, techniques and tools relevant to the adopted software process improvement (SPI) methodology. It requires collective effort from the project team ensuring customer requirements are met, contract fulfilment and Service-Level-Agreement compliance. Most importantly, the SQAP will be used as the quality manual (QM) by the organisation to improve business’s operations, protect its reputation, accelerate change and meet customer needs. Any mis-conduct of SQAP will weaken customer relationship, damage in brand and reputation, major increased in both operational and financial costs; which further jeopardize the organization’s competitiveness and confidence level in the IT industry. As such, setting vital and critical checkpoints throughout different phases of project life cycle (PLC) and system development life cycle (SDLC) indeed is a crucial factor to successful implementation of SQAP. However, there are times a project manager and/or software quality assurance managers only place emphasis on the development scope of works but overlooked overall activities in the entire project life cycle. As a result, the setting of checkpoints in the SQAP has neglected to benchmark against the adopted standards resulting more than a set of SQAP within the organization. This has created unnecessary stress and burden to the project team when everyone is striving to implement all procedures and processes correctly within the constraint of allocated duration and timeline. This paper aims to outline a set of checkpoints throughout the PLC and SDLC to provide assistance and benchmarking for the IT industry implementing software project management as formal software process initiatives within the organization.