Quality Tools in Practice: Using Generic Tools to Improve Software Quality

Abstract

There has been many quality tools suggested since the discipline of "Quality Management" started to develop. However, in software engineering, their uses are limited. Software is different from traditional industry, and the quality of software is more difficult to manage. Therefore, software quality managers turn to the conceptual and organizational levels of managing quality. Some of the software project managers tend to believe in software developers' self-management of quality. Only targets and guidelines are pushed to software developers, whose specialities are usually not quality management, but few concrete quality tools and approaches are suggested in practice. Consequently, when software quality does not appear as expected, software developers suffer from pressure of quality targets, but they cannot carry out effective actions to make improvement.

In this thesis, the operational level of quality management in software development is researched to prove that training of basic quality tools to software developers is an effective way of improving quality in large-scale software development.

This thesis aims to confirm the feasibility of using basic quality tools to improve quality performance in large-scale software development, and to provide an overview of fundamental issues in software quality improvement in addition.