Quality and Productivity Improvement by Application of Quality and Process Modelling

by Dieter Welzel

As software system engineering is, compared to other engineering rather young, mature, certified quality management systems (QMS) as well as product assessment procedures are not widely available in IT industry. On the other hand QMS's conform to sector specific regulations or international standard (e.g. ISO 9000)will be required for IT departments, IT suppliers, and software houses or system companies. GMD conducts research and distribution actions to introduce and to improve QMS on the basis of well-defined process assessment procedures and together with product evaluation and certification techniques.

For product assessment standardised quality criteria (e.g. ISO 9126) have to be considered. Process standards, such as ISO 9000 for QMS, have to be applied to assess maturity and capabilities of companies and projects. Today many companies must reorganise software development activities to meet those regulations and standards.

With regard to software system engineering within a project, the following aspects need to be considered:

• assessment and continuous improvement of software process engineering
• assessment and continuous improvement of software quality management
• assessment and continuous improvement of customer service.

These company and project specific process improvements are managed by the rule-driven system ProcePT (Process Programming and Testing). It is complemented by HAWE, our standardised product assessment and certification method (c.f. ISO 14598). HAWE comprises:

• Quality definition by determining software attributes and software metrics with their expected values
• Allocation of product and process information to these metrics
• Selection of evaluation techniques to be used
• Metrics collection
• Assessment of measured values by multi-dimensional assessment
• Integration of specifying, designing, performing, assessing and reporting activities in the development procedures

Strategy for initiation and improvement of Quality Assurance

The experience gained using HAWE and well-defined software process models has been made available to several European technology transfer initiatives.

Please contact:
Hans-Ludwig Hausen - GMD
Tel: +49 2241 14 3224
E-mail: hausengmd.de