Return to Glossary

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is a means and practice of monitoring the software engineering processes and methods used in a project to ensure proper quality of the software.  It may include ensuring conformance to standards or models, such as ISO/IEC 9126 (now superseded by ISO/IEC 25010:2011 SQuaRE -- System and Software Quality Models), or Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).

It includes standards and procedures that managers, administrators or even developers may use to review and audit software products and activities to verify that the software meets quality criteria which link to standards. According to Automotive SPICE (which is based on ISO/IEC 15504), software quality assurance is a supporting process (SUP.1) that provides the independent assurance that all work products, activities and processes comply with the predefined plans and quality strategies.

SQA encompasses the entire software development process, including requirements engineering, software design, coding, code reviews, source code control, software configuration management, testing, release management and software integration. It is organized into goals, commitments, abilities, activities, measurements, verification and validation.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_quality_assurance