Evaluating the Effectiveness of Software Quality Assurance in Sri Lankan Offshore Development Organizations

to understand and implement necessary quality transformation:

1. Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and service: Stay in business and provide jobs through innovation, research, constant improvement and maintenance.
2. Adopt the new philosophy: For the new economic age, management needs to take leadership for change into a learning organization.
3. Cease dependence on mass inspection: Eliminate the need for mass inspection by building quality into the product.
4. End awarding business on price: Aim at minimum total cost and move towards single suppliers.
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service: Improvement is not a one-time effort. Management is obligated to continually look for ways to reduce waste and improve quality.
6. Institute training: Workers should be trained properly on their jobs. . Institute leadership: Leading shall consist of helping people to do a better job and to learn by objective methods.
7. Drive out fear: To assure better quality and productivity, people feel secure.
8. Break down barriers between departments: Team work culture across departments.
9. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and numerical targets: Let workers formulate their own slogans. Then they will be committed to the contents.
10. Eliminate numerical quotas or work standards: Quotas take into account only numbers, not quality or methods. They are usually a guarantee of inefficiency and high cost.

A person, in order to hold a job, will try to meet a quota at any cost, including doing damage to the company. 12. Remove barriers to taking pride in workmanship: People are eager to do a good job and distressed when they cannot.

13. Institute a vigorous programme of education: Both management and the work force will have to be educated in the new knowledge and understanding, including teamwork and statistical techniques. 14. Take action to accomplish the transformation: It will require a special top management team with a plan of action to carry out the quality mission. A critical mass of people in the company must understand the 14 points.

JURAN AND THE IMPORTANCE OF TOP MANAGEMENT COMMITMENT TO QUALITY

Joseph M Juran proposes two meanings to quality:

• Quality consists of those product features which meet the need of customers and thereby provide product satisfaction.
• Quality consists of freedom from deficiencies. In the handbook Juran propose quality as “fitness for use” rather than “meeting customer needs” he argues that it is not a feasible task to meet customer need. His view is much closer to the thought – “conformance to specifications”.

Selected Attribute Analyzability ISO Definition “The capability of the software product to be diagnosed for deficiencies or causes of failures in the software, or for the parts to be modified to be identified. ” “The capability of the software product to enable a specified modification to be implemented. ” “The capability of the software product to avoid unexpected effects from modifications of the software. ” “The capability of the software product to be adapted for different specified environments without applying actions or means other than those provided for this purpose for the software considered. “The capability of the software product to be installed in a specified environment. ” “The capability of the software product to co-exist with other independent

software in a common environment sharing common resources. ” Changeability Stability Adaptability Installability Co-existence Replaceability “The capability of the software product to be used in place of another specified software product for the same purpose in the same environment. ” Table 3: Additional developer related quality attributes from ISO 9126 model

FINAL ATTRIBUTE LIST

Instrumentation makes it possible to put probes in the system in order to deduce test data. Self-descriptive systems have inbuilt help or system documentation which will be sufficient to understand the system by going through. Modularity helps in isolating system tests which structuredness denotes consistent organization of the system. Accountability on system for which it is possible to measure the usage of the code[19]. Such measurements are typically covered by debugging tools, which exist specifically for programming languages. Accessibility of a system allows usage of its parts in a selective manner[19].

Stability is directly influenced by Changeability. Low changeability is likely to show low stability. This will depict the fact that, trying to change a low changeable system will lead to a greater risk of instability.  defines Installability as “The capability of the software product to be installed in a specified environment”[24]. Installability requirements are generally specified in the form of an installation process. The target environment in this case will have to be known at the development time.

Installability is measured as a percentage exercised of the total specified Installability requirements. In the Sri Lankan context, Installability is commonly referred as Deployability. Having identified the variables and attributes, it had been decided to limit the study to following variables, after interviewing key quality assurance personnel in

target organizations. Based on their arguments, on applicability to offshore organizations, the best-suited variables have been selected for the study.

In order to statistically test the derived conceptual framework, following hypotheses have been formulated. Since the study is targeted to test each independent variable separately, hypotheses also have been formulated independently to each independent variable. H01: there is no relationship between the Correctness of software developed and released to QA team), on the effectiveness of software quality assurance approach. HA1: the greater the Correctness of software developed and delivered to QA team, the higher the effectiveness of software quality assurance approach.

• H02: there is no relationship between the Testability of software developed and released to QA team, on the effectiveness of software quality assurance approach.
• HA2: the greater the Testability of software developed and delivered to QA team, the higher the effectiveness of software quality assurance approach.
• H03: there is no relationship between the Changeability of software developed and released to QA team, on the effectiveness of software quality assurance approach.
• HA3: the greater the Changeability of software developed and delivered to QA team, the higher the effectiveness of software quality assurance approach.
• H04: there is no relationship between the Stability of software developed and released to QA team, on the effectiveness of software quality assurance approach.
• HA4: the greater the Stability of software developed and delivered to QA team, the higher the effectiveness of software quality assurance approach.
• H05: there is no relationship between the Installability of software developed and released to QA team, on the effectiveness of software
  

quality assurance approach.