Customer Oriented Software Quality Assurance [Paperback]

Frank P. Ginac (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0135714648 | ISBN-13: 978-0135714645 | Publication Date: December 29, 1997 | Edition: 1

This is a comprehensive, practical "How-to" guide to customer-focused software quality assurance, for organizations of all sizes and types.The premise of this book is simple: your customers are the best judge of software quality. Therefore, your customers must be an integral part of your QA program. Learn how to design a QA program that builds on your customers' expectations. Understand how to select the right metrics, test methods, types and tools. Finally, walk through QA program development, and consider the appropriate role of formal evaluation programs such as ISO 9000 and SEI CMM.For anyone faced with building or improving a software quality assurance organization, or building quality into software products. Titles include: QA managers, test managers, software development managers and senior IT executives.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

57146-3

Put customer satisfaction at the heart of your success!

Look through the eyes of your customers to find out what they really want from your software.

While management quality programs focus on statistics like percentages of code coverage and errors per thousand lines of code, your customers' quality requirements may be totally overlooked. Of course successful products have to work well, but what exactly does "work well" mean to your customers? Now you can learn how to put your customers at the center of your organization's software quality program.

In an engagingly personal style, Customer Oriented Software Quality Assurance gives you the complete picture, including:

• Developing a Quality Attributes Set
• Metrics
• Testing and evaluation
• Proactive quality tools
• Formal appraisal programs

By putting the human face back on quality, this book will help you reach your total goals and build a base of loyal and satisfied customers.

About the Author

FRANK P. GINAC has more than twelve years of experience developing quality programs based on customer satisfaction for organizations both large and small.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (December 29, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0135714648
• ISBN-13: 978-0135714645
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #605,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SQA Engineers must read this book., June 29, 2001

By 

Bennett Fonacier (San Ramon, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Customer Oriented Software Quality Assurance (Paperback)

I have been in the SQA business for 10+ years. I wanted to test my field knowledge by taking a certification. To my surprise, I did not pass the "Brainbench SQA Certification" (from brainbench.com) the first time I took it. Therefore, I wanted to find out what information I was missing. The test site recommended several books from Amazon.com. I choose this book because it seem to the information that I was looking for at a low cost. After reading this book, I was able to retest and pass the Brainbench SQA Certification.

What I like about this book is the basic industry information that an SQA Engineer should know. It is full of information in metrics. As a tester, I know that metrics were important but I did not know where to apply it effectively. It is also provided me some basic information in ISO 9000 and SEI CMM appraisals in customer-focused quality assurance.

I know there are many software organizations out there that have have not read this book. I highly recommend this book or similar basic book for those organizations that want to develop a quality product based on customer orientation.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Too basic for the SQA practitioner, but ..., January 26, 2001

By 

Mike Tarrani "www.tarrani.com" (Deltona, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Customer Oriented Software Quality Assurance (Paperback)

I agree with the previous reviewer that this book is a basic primer on software quality assurance. From the perspective of a software quality assurance practitioner I would have rated this book at 3 stars and moved on.

However, this book has much to offer to four domains outside of SQA:

(1) Developers - most developers are woefully unaware of the basics of SQA. They have no idea of the much larger picture and how they fit into the scheme of things in a process that is designed to deliver a quality software product. In fairness to developers they have a daunting task just keeping up with the techniques and technologies that characterize their domain. What this book will do for a developer, particularly one who is working within the context of Extreme Programming (XP), is to provide a foundation for software quality. It also provides an awareness of SEI's capability maturity model (CMM), about which most developers outside of defense-related software organizations probably don't know much. It also gives a good overview of ISO 9000-3 (also known as TickIT).

(2) Testers - software testing and SQA are two vastly different functions. Testing is done to verify and validate software or to break it. In the verification and validation stage testers find the answer to: Did we build the right thing? Did we build it right? This is done in the user acceptance/product test environment. Testers try to break software in the staging/pre-production environment. In this respect testers are the natural enemy of developers. Contrast this with SQA - this function is a process and oversight function that is usually performed at the program management office (PMO) or software engineering process group level. In an ideal world SQA concerns themselves with developing and implementing processes that minimize defects and rework. They work with trends, statistics and other quantitative methods and attempt to answer questions such as: Where in the development life cycle did the defect get introduced? What can we do to the process to prevent it from happening again? This book exposes testers to a brave new world called SQA and shows how they fit into the much larger picture of delivering quality.

(3) Production Services (a.k.a, production support, application support, and a plethora of other names) - this group is on the front line and is comprised of a number of functions, all of which would benefit from this book. The help desk staff will have a clear idea of quality indicators to measure that mean something to both the business and the applications delivery team. For example, while defect density metrics may mean something to the SQA group, it is of less concern to the help desk. On the other hand, the help desk (and tier 2 application support) would find metrics such as defect removal efficiency to me a useful measure. This metric is the ratio of defects found in testing and defects discovered production. This does three things: shows how effective the testing function is, provides a baseline for developer resources needed to fix the problems, and provides an indication of the resources necessary to support an application.

(4) Project manager - here is a succinct resource that shows you where you need to focus your quality efforts during the development life cycle.

I liked the fact that the author resisted the temptation to write a ten pound tome on a subject that could have consumed thousands of pages. At 208 pages it is an easy read, provides a clear picture of SQA for the non-practitioner, and is well suited for the audience that I cited above. Because of my view of the potential audience for this book I felt that it deserved a solid five stars.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Little and Too Basic for QA Engineers, August 26, 2004

By 

K. Smith "K. Smith" (San Jose, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Customer Oriented Software Quality Assurance (Paperback)

Although this book provides you some basic insights about customer-oriented quality assurance concepts, it offers too little and too primitive basics for someone who want to learn solid software QA basics, processes, methods, and metrics, and standards, and quality systems. It does not provide fundamental
basics for you to learn how to work and perform as a SQA engineer.