Integrated Quality Assurance

Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE

Besides our constructive development and engineering activities, which are necessary for achieving the required product quality, efficient and effective methods are also needed for quality assurance. Product quality is a decisive competition factor for software developing compa­nies. But qualified personnel are rare and expensive, and quality assurance, in particular, must often make do with scarce resources. In light of this situation, it is becoming more and more difficult to detect and correct defects that have cropped up during a devel­opment process, and to do so in time, before the product is delivered. How­ever, these risks do not only occur in new developments – even the reuse of components in customer-specific solu­tions may lead to spectacular quality defects later on in the software product if adequate quality assurance is missing.

Managing Quality Assurance

Many projects expend more effort on testing activities than necessary. Fraunhofer IESE focuses testing effort by aligning and integrating testing activities with preceding software development activities such as requirements analysis, but also with inspections. Defects that remain undetected until the testing phase cause unnecessary costs. Inspections permit performing quality assurance of your documents early in the software development cycle. We support your inspectors by using the Fraunhofer tool DETECT to perform efficient manual evaluation of your development documents. DETECT offers suitable reading support, can be customized to individual quality features, and teaches the inspectors expert knowledge. Last but not least, DETECT generates clearly structured defect reports.

Integrated quality assurance offers you cost-efficient methods and tools for validating whether or not a system can meet the required system qualities. These include:

  • Training and technology transfer
  • Evaluation of existing testing and inspection processes
  • Support during testing and test case derivation
  • Integration of quality assurance best practices along the system lifecycle using software engineering principles and best practices for requirements engineering, architectural design, and implementation
  • Interlocking of quality assurance activities with new software engineering paradigms such as cloud computing, mobile devices and variant-rich systems.

We help you to master your quality assurance challenges.