A software quality assurance plan for a 'special' manufacturing environment.
David Henry Taylor · Lehigh Preserve · 1983
This thesis develops a software quality assurance plan for a defined environment.The environment involves a small manufacturing facility producing custom designed machinery.The machinery is controlled by real-time, process control software executing on a microprocessor based computer.The need for a software quality assurance process in the environment is justified based on both error liability costs and software development costs.The concept of reuseable software in the defined environment and its affect on these costs is described.Desired software attributes are defined and are ranked in importance in the given environment.The affect of various phases of the software development process on these attributes is discussed.The software quality assurance process is defined to be an organized, systematic application of design, development, and verification approaches which build in software quality as well as test out software error.Various software design, development and verification techniques are reviewed.A quality assurance plan for the defined environment is presented in an IEEE standard format.The plan includes specific requirements definition, design, code, and test review procedures.It also incorporates a design philosophy based on top-down, functionally organized decomposition approaches which include information hiding concepts, The problems of start-up implementation of the plan are discussed.The growth potential of the plan is also analyzed.failure of the program may be significant in terms of public safety or economics.As a result, the programs developed need to be of "good" quality.In developing the proposed quality assurance process, the question of what is "quality" software is examined, and current software quality assurance techniques are studied.Appropriate techniques are then organized into a software