Classification: Quality Assurance alternatives

December 16 12:30 2011 by Nataliia Vasylyna Print This Article

An accurate survey of how various quality assurance alternatives deal with errors can help to make general schemes of classification. This classification can be used in assisting how to choose, adapt, and use various quality assurance alternatives and related methods for specific applications.

Quality assurance activities can be reviewed as attempts to avert, eliminate, reduce, or contain different specific problems related to different aspects of software bugs.

Quality assurance alternatives can be classified into three generic categories, which are described below:

Software bug prevention by blocking defects or by removing the source of errors

These quality assurance activities prevent certain types of errors that can be injected into the software. Due to the fact that errors can be passed, or because of incorrect work of people which leads to the penetration of errors in software systems, we can immediately fix or block these processes or eliminate the underlying causes for them.

Software bug prevention can be made in 2 general ways:

1. Fault prevention or blocking by accurate correcting or blocking these missing or invalid human deeds.
2. Removing typical software bug sources, such as eliminating ambiguities or correcting human delusions, which are the main reasons for errors.

This category breaks the relation between error sources and defects through the use of some tools and methodologies, product standards.

Software bug reduction through defects detection and removal

These quality assurance alternatives detect and eliminate typical defects once they have been put into the software systems. Actually, the main quality assurance activities are concentrated in this category.

For instance, verification directly detects and corrects errors in the design and program code and software testing removes errors based on observations of similar bugs in the process during the performance of the program.

Other methods based on static analyses or observations can be used to decrease the number of errors in the program.

Software bug control by failure prevention and containment

These precautionary measures center on the errors by either deterring them in the local places to avoid global errors or by limiting the damage caused by the failure of the system.

Thus, error control can be made in 2 general ways:

1. Containment measures to escape from disastrous consequences such as death, accident, or injury to property or the environment in case of failures.
2. Such quality assurance alternatives as the use of fault-tolerance methods break the relation between faults and failures to avoid global errors.

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