Roles and Responsibilities in REM - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 156

11.2.4 Quality Assurance
Quality assurance includes both defect prevention and defect detection. Defect
prevention is ensured using the defined organizational process. Quality control
needs to be performed at the project level to uncover all lurking defects so that
they can be fixed.
The quality control in an organization is like police in a town. Existence of
police cannot prevent a determined criminal but would deter any criminal with
lesser determination from committing a crime. Besides, the police would catch the
criminal, well almost all criminals. So is quality control; it cannot prevent all
the defects from being injected but it would prevent most and trap most of the
remaining ones so that we deliver a near defect-free deliverable.
Presently, many software development organizations do not have a robust
quality control department. In organizations that develop software for in-house
(within the organization) use, independent quality control may itself be totally
absent. This is not conducive to delivering good quality outputs.
It is the organization's responsibility to establish a robust quality assurance
department and ensure that rigorous quality control is carried out on all the
deliverables including the requirements engineering deliverables. Quality control
activities may not prevent injection of defects but uncovers them and ensures that
the final deliverable is as defect free as humanly possible.
11.2.5 Training
Having qualified staff is essential to perform requirements engineering activities in
the organization efficiently. But periodic training to update and hone their skills is
essential if we need to continue performing at the highest level. These days, a
significant amount of research is being carried out in every field of human
endeavor and so is the case with the field of requirements engineering. The way
requirements engineering activities were performed in the 1970s is vastly different
from the way they are now performed. If we do not train and keep our staff at the
cutting edge of developments, they will soon become obsolete very quickly,
especially in these days of fast obsolescence.
A training department in the organization would go a long way in ensuring that
all the staff is adequately trained. The training department ought to perform the
following activities:
1. Maintain the skill database of all employees of the organization
2. Organize a knowledge repository to facilitate self-study to update knowledge
3. Assess the training needs of the staff at regular intervals and analyze the gaps in
the skills available and the skills needed
4. Draw up training plans to bridge the skill gaps uncovered in the above analysis