ASK Services: Quality Assurance (QA)

In both the traditional sense of product assurance, and in the CMMI^®-sense of process assurance, QA is an especially demanding function with which ASK Process has special experience.

Process and Product Quality Assurance means different things to different people.

• So some, "QA" means "test" ("We’re ready to QA the software.")
• Others embrace a wider meaning of assuring quality by reviewing specifications, designs, user interfaces, and even code to assure that what is built is high-quality in the first place.
• Some see QA’s role as collecting appropriate metrics (e.g. peer review defect detection data) to assure that the software development work is effective.
• In the Capability Maturity Model Intrgration^® (CMMI^®), PPQA is mainly focused on assuring that organizational processes have been faithfully followed, and that those processes are effective.

We believe that QA should embrace all of these things, because that is the only way to assure quality. To assure quality, we must assure that our processes are being followed and are working well, we must check work products at every step of the way, we must collect the data that will allow us to see what is happening, and we must test the resulting software to be sure that our other efforts are effective.

While it is not necessary to put all of these functions in the same department (in large organizations, this would be too wide a focus), they are all important to the quality of our software and the processes we use to build it.

ASK Process provides consultation in establishing and assuring the effectiveness of all of these quality functions, regardless of where they reside in the organization.

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