Quality engineering (also known as quality management) is a process that evaluates, assesses, and improves the quality of software. There are three major groups of activities in the quality engineering process:
- Quality planning: This stage establishes the overall quality goal by managing customer's expectations under the project cost and budgetary constraints. This quality plan also includes the strategy, that is, the selection of activities to perform and the appropriate quality measurements to provide feedback and assessment.
- Quality Assurance (QA): This guarantees that software products and processes in the project life cycle meet their specified requirements by planning and performing a set of activities to provide adequate confidence that quality is being built into the software. The main QA activity is Verification & Validation, but there are others, such as software quality metrics, the use of quality standards, configuration management, documentation management, or an expert's opinion.
- Post-QA: These stage includes activities for quality quantification and improvement measurement, analysis, feedback, and follow-up activities. The aim of these activities is to provide quantitative assessment of product quality and identification of improvement opportunities.
These phases are represented in the following chart:
Software Quality Engineering Process