Software product assurance: measurement and control

This paper describes a measurement-oriented approach to software product assurance that helps managers to achieve the level of confidence and control necessary to ensure successful project completion. The paper covers three major topics. First, it explains some important views of software quality: satisfaction of requirements, conformance to standards, and technical excellence. Second, the paper outlines the project planning, configuration management, quality assurance, and software measurement activities that compose software product assurance. Third, the paper explains some numerical techniques for setting quality objectives and assessing performance. It distinguishes between implementation process control and product quality control. While quantitative quality techniques are new to most software enterprises, they have been successfully applied to other manufacturing processes for many years.