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SQA and Software Configuration Management

• Posted by author on December 31st, 2008 filed in SQA - Advice Center
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SQA must function in an identified and controlled software engineering process. Both ANSI/IEEE Std 730-1984 and MIL-S-52779A require SQA to ascertain that SCM plan complies to certain standards, but do not require SQA to write the SCM plan. In the author’s opinion SQA shall be responsible for the SCM auditing function and SQA shall participate in software configuration control boards. The above SQA plan standards request SQA plan to assure the detection, documentation, and correction of software problems. This function is best implemented as part of the configuration management system and should not be implemented as a separate system.

SQA should have the necessary privileges as configuration management system user to ascertain that problem reporting is handled properly. In the author’s opinion the practice of quality assurance organizations to maintain a Failure Reporting and Corrective Action System (FRACAS) separate from the corporate or project configuration management system is not a good practice for software projects. It is not easy to separate problem reports from change proposals, and it is not easy to separate the operations and maintenance field service from continuous software development and support. There should be one and only one system to handle the entire flow of change proposals and problem reports. The above viewpoints are necessary to Comply to DOD-STD-2168*.