Quality Assurance on Upstream Process of System Development : Reviewing Artifacts for Testability(<Special Issue>Project Quality and Customer Satisfaction)

Abstract

With the advancement in Information Technology (IT), software industry has made significant growth over the past years. Nearly all companies are using some kind of "IT systems" to do their business. Those systems are aimed to the have all the functionality designed, as well as to able to meet the quality attributes such as reliability, usability, maintainability and so on. However, during the last few decades, few improvements in the quality of software is observed. While QCD is critical to all projects, the "quality" attribute is difficult to quantify and has often been disregarded. As a result, delay of the service happened when system performance problem arise, loss of business opportunities due to the sudden stop of the system, and worse of all, even lives and properties are endangered due to malfunction of the systems. To most companies, it is a major challenge to improve quality with limited cost. While some of them spend a good portion of cost on testing, they are not getting the results they expected. According to our research, many of these systems are not having their test done correctly, and in some cases, they cannot even create the test cases from the specification for testing. In this paper, we first revisit static testing. Then we make a discussion focus on "testability" and show how can we improve the testability of the system and create test cases from documents of the upstream development process such as requirement definition documents and design documents.