Software Project Management in Practice

By Pankaj Jalote
© 2003 by Addison Wesley

Chapter 05
Quality Planning

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 Not only Cost & Schedule but QUALITY is also a
major factor in determining the success of the
project.
Contents
1. Quality Concepts
2. Models of Quality Management
3. Quantitative Quality Management
Planning Steps
4. Case Study – The ACIC Project
5. Summary

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1. Quality Concepts
1.1 Defect
1.2 Defect injection and removal cycle
1.3 Software quality
1.4 Quality management activities

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1.1 Defect
 Defect in software is something that causes the software to behave
in a manner that is inconsistent with the requirement of the need of
the customer
 For High Quality software, the final product should have as few
defects as possible
 Since Software Development is a HUMAN activity, it is not possible
to prevent injection of all defects. But it can be reduced by Quality
control activity, which is Review & Testing
1.2 Defect injection and removal cycle
1.3 Software quality
 There are many characteristic which define Quality. But the de
facto industry standard definition of Quality is: “The number of
defects per unit size in the delivered software”
 This is problematical for software systems
- Tension between customer quality requirements (efficiency,
reliability, etc.) and developer quality requirements (maintainability,
reusability, etc.)
- Some quality requirements are difficult to specify in an
unambiguous way
- Software specifications are usually incomplete and often
inconsistent
Software quality
attributes:
1.4 Quality management activities

 Quality assurance
- Establish organisational procedures and standards for
quality
 Quality planning
- Select applicable procedures and standards for a
particular project and modify these as required
 Quality control
- Ensure that procedures and standards are followed by
the software development team, such as Requirement
Review, Design Review, Code review, Unit Testing,
Integration Testing, System Testing & Acceptance
Testing
 Quality management should be separate from project
management to ensure independence
Quality management and software development
2. Models of Quality Management
 A good quality management approach should
provide warning signs early in the project & not
just towards the end
 Early warning allow for timely intervention
 Therefore during project execution some
parameter are measured & compared with the
estimated values to determine whether the
project is going along “desired” path.
2.1 Procedural Approach to Quality
Management
2.2 Quantitative Approach to Quality
Management
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2.1 Procedural Approach to Quality
Management

 Defects are detected by performing Review or Testing

 Review are structured, human oriented process
 Testing is the process of executing software to identify
defects
 In procedural approach for Quality management,
procedures & guidelines for review & testing are
established
 Executing a set of defect removal procedures does not
provide a basis for judging their effectiveness or
assessing the quality of the final code
2.2 Quantitative Approach to Quality
Management
 Is the process of controlling the Quality of the software
based on quantitative data
 Two key aspects: setting a quantitative quality goal and then
managing the software development process quantitatively
so that this quality goal is met (with a high degree of
confidence)
 Software reliability: use the failure data during the final
stages of testing to estimate the reliability of the software
 Defect removal efficiency: the defect removal efficiency is
defined as the percentage of existing total defects that are
detected by the QC activity
 Defect prediction: you set the quality goal in terms of
delivered defect density. You set the intermediate goals by
estimating the number of defects that may be identified by
various defect detection activities; then you compare the
actual number of defects to the estimated defect levels
 Defect removal efficiency

 Defect prediction
3. Quantitative Quality
Management Planning Steps
 This process involves setting the Quality goals for
the project
 The quality goal is the expected no of defects during
acceptance test, and the primary source for setting
the quality goals are PDB & PCB
 Steps to build Quality Planning:
3.1 Setting the Quality Goal
3.2 Estimating Defects for Other Stages
3.2 Modifying Quality Process Planning (if
any)
3.4 Planning of Defect Prevention
3.1 Setting the Quality Goal
 Two primary sources can be used for setting the quality goal:
past data from similar projects and data from the PCB
 You can set the quality target as the number of defects per
function point, or you set the target in terms of the process's
defect removal efficiency (the number of defects to be
expected during acceptance testing)
3.2 Estimating Defects for other stage:
 From the estimate of the total no of defects that will be
introduced during the course of the project, the defect level for
different testing stage are forecast by using percentage
distribution of defects as given in PCB
3.3 Modifying Quality Process Planning
(if any)
3.4 Planning of Defect Prevention
 For a stable process, the defect removal efficiency is also
generally stable. Hence, the higher the defect injection rate,
the poorer the quality. Clearly, for a given process and its
removal efficiency, the quality of the final delivered software
can be improved if fewer defects are introduced while the
software is being built. This recognition serves as the quality
motivation for defect prevention.

Defect
distribution
at Infosys PCB
4. Case Study – ACIC project
 ACIC Corporation is a multibillion-dollar financial institution.
To keep up with the times, several years ago it started slowly
Web-enabling its applications, and it wanted to start an on-line
service for opening and tracking accounts. Because Infosys
had successfully built some e-services for ACIC earlier in a
project called Synergy (name changed), ACIC employed
Infosys to analyze the problem. This work was executed in
time and material (T&M) mode—that is, the customer paid for
the effort spent by Infosys in doing the analysis. The project
successfully released the new service in time, and the
software has been in operation without any problem.
 Quality Planning: please refer to: Chapter 05 - ACIC
project_Quality Plan.docx

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5. Summary

 The methods described in this chapter satisfy the quality

planning requirements of the Software Product
Engineering KPA and the planning requirements of the
Peer Review KPA at level 3 of the CMM.
 They also satisfy the quantitative quality planning
requirements of the Software Quality Management KPA
at level 4. The defect prevention planning satisfies some
requirements of the Defect Prevention KPA of level 5

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  Source: http://www.processimpact.com/articles/miscon.html

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References

 Pankaj Jalote (2003), Software Project Management in

Practice: Chapter 5. Quality Planning, Addison Wesley
 Ian Sommerville (2004), Software Engineering (7th
Edition): Chapter 27, Addison Wesley
 http://read.pudn.com/downloads124/ebook/526153/CMM
/Quality%20Planning%20And%20Defects.ppt

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