Quality Assurance in Requirements Management - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 91

the new concept of Total Quality Management (TQM) gained ground. TQM
suggests building all activities necessary to build quality into the process (either
for manufacturing or services) itself so that the need for quality control is dras-
tically reduced and thereby reduces the cost of achieving quality itself. This has led
to organizations moving towards a process-driven management.
This is a brief introduction to the vast subject of quality. Interested readers are
suggested to read my topic on software quality assurance cited in the foregoing
section.

6.2 Quality Assurance in the Context of Requirements
Engineering and Management

In order to ensure that quality is built into project requirements, we need to put in
place five things:

1. Process, standards and guidelines
2. Right people with right training
3. Quality control of the deliverables of requirements engineering
4. Measurement and analysis
5. Project postmortem during the project closure.

Now let us discuss these five things in detail.

6.2.1 Process, Standards and Guidelines

These are in fact the pre-requisites for ensuring quality in the deliverables of the
requirements engineering and management activity. As we have learnt in the
earlier sections that the quality control activities are post-facto and do not build in
quality into the deliverables. We have to ensure that the activities are carried out in
such a manner that quality gets built into the deliverables by the individuals
performing the activities. This is the philosophy advocated by TQM. This can be
achieved by defining a comprehensive process for carrying out the activity in the
organization and then internalize it among the individuals performing the
requirements engineering activities. A process is a network of procedures,
standards, guidelines, formats, templates and checklists which are appropriate for
the organization. By appropriate, I mean:

1. They must be suitable for the kind of work being executed within the

organization
2. They must be elaborate enough to ensure capture of complete information
3. They must be so designed as to assist the users in performing the work effi-
ciently and comprehensively