SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE

Standards and Procedures

Establishing standards and procedures for softwaredevelopment is critical, since these provide the frameworkfrom which the software evolves. Standards are theestablished criteria to which the software products arecompared. Procedures are the established criteria to whichthe development and control processes are compared.Standards and procedures establish the prescribed methodsfor developing software; the SQA role is to ensure theirexistence and adequacy. Proper documentation of standardsand procedures is necessary since the SQA activities ofprocess monitoring, product evaluation, and auditing relyupon unequivocal definitions to measure project compliance.

Types of standards include:

Documentation Standards specify form and content for planning, control, and product documentation and provide consistency throughout a project. The NASA Data Item Descriptions (DIDs) are documentation standards (see Appendix B).
Design Standards specify the form and content of the design product. They provide rules and methods for translating the software requirements into the software design and for representing it in the design documentation.
Code Standards specify the language in which the code is to be written and define any restrictions on use of language features. They define legal language structures, style conventions, rules for data structures and interfaces, and internal code documentation.

Procedures are explicit steps to be followed in carrying outa process. All processes should have documented procedures.Examples of processes for which procedures are needed areconfiguration management, nonconformance reporting andcorrective action, testing, and formal inspections.
If developed according to the NASA DID, the Management Plandescribes the software development control processes, suchas configuration management, for which there have to beprocedures, and contains a list of the product standards.Standards are to be documented according to the Standardsand Guidelines DID in the Product Specification. Theplanning activities required to assure that both productsand processes comply with designated standards andprocedures are described in the QA portion of the ManagementPlan.