what is software quality assurance in software engineering

An assurance is a statement or indication that inspires confidence free from doubt. This term comes into use in the IT world too. The level of confidence that software is free from vulnerabilities, either intentionally designed into the software or accidentally inserted at anytime during its life cycle and that the software functions in the intended manner is known as software assurance. Its main objective of software assurance is to ensure that the processes, procedures, and products used to produce and sustain the software conform to all requirements and standards specified to govern those processes, procedures, and products.

There are companies that run these tests to verify whether a software is truly up to the mark. These tests are important from the security point of view. As stated by Gary McGraw “Design flaws account for 50% of security problems. One can’t find design defects by staring at code. A higher-level understanding is required. That’s why architectural risk analysis plays an essential role in any solid software security program.” Hence software assurance ensures that the software-intensive systems produced are more secure.

For software-intensive systems, a preventive dynamic and static analysis of the potential vulnerabilities is required, and holistic, system-level understanding is recommended. This can be done through by means of monitoring the software engineering processes and methods used to ensure quality. The entire software development process, which includes processes such as requirements definition, software design, coding, source code control, code reviews, software configuration management, testing, release management, and product integration are included in this monitoring and known as software quality assurance activities.

In today’s age you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to build and maintain testing team and process. Instead you can use cost effective solutions provided by testing service providers from all over the world. These companies can provide you the best solutions and more control over the process, resulting in higher productivity of your existing teams and releases. Outsourcing testing work to specialized independent testing services providers is always the best solution for cost-cutting and building a high quality competitive product in the market.

Many business activities and critical functions — from national defence to banking to healthcare to telecommunications to aviation to control of hazardous materials — depend on the correct, predictable operation of software. These activities could be seriously disrupted were the software-intensive systems that they rely on to fail. Software assurance ensures to a large extent that this could be avoided by tracking down potential flaws and erroneous spots in a software thus avoiding expensive and often time consuming damage control.