Software quality assurance in practice

This paper presents the key findings of a survey of a representative sample of the Australian software industry as to the actual use and application of quality assurance techniques in the development of software. The survey aims to confirm previous survey findings through a management questionnaire and to investigate the software development practices at the screen face through a developer questionnaire. The separate responses are analysed to rate the extent to which quality management practices have penetrated the information systems department. The project commenced in July 1994 and the results of this initial survey support the hypothesis that software quality assurance programmes have not yet penetrated to the systems developers at lower levels of organizations.