What is Quality Engineering all about?

Quality engineering deals with the development, operation, management, & maintenance of IT systems as well as enterprise architectures with high quality standard.

Well, IT services tend to be increasingly interlinked especially in workflows across device, platform boundaries, & organizational boundaries, for instance, in business-to-business workflows, cyber-physical systems, or when utilizing cloud services. When it comes to such contexts, quality engineering enables the much needed all-embracing consideration in terms of quality attributes. Moreover, an “end-to-end” outlook of quality right from management up to operation in such contexts is essential. Quality Engineering seems to integrate methods as well as tools from software-product management, enterprise architecture management, systems engineering, IT services management, software engineering, information security management and software quality management.

In other words, quality engineering goes well beyond the classic disciplines meant for software engineering or software product management as it integrates:

• Management issues (like risk management, business & IT strategy, knowledge & information management, business process views, operative performance management)

• Design considerations (such as software development process, software testing and requirements analysis)

• Operative considerations (including monitoring, configuration, and IT service management)

In the most fields it is used in, Quality Engineering seems to be linked closely to compliance with business and legal demands and contractual obligations & standards. In terms of quality attributes, security, reliability, and safety of IT services do play a major role.

As far as Quality Engineering is concerned, quality objectives tend to be implemented in a well-defined collaborative process. Moreover, this process requires interaction of principally independent actors, the knowledge of whom depends on various information sources.

Actors – Well, the approach of end-to-end quality management in Quality Engineering needs a lot of actors with varied responsibilities & tasks, expertise and sheer involvement in the organization.

Let us have a look at the different roles that are involved in Quality Engineering:

• IT architect

• Business architect

• Requirements engineer

• Software quality manager

• Project manager

• Test manager

• Security architect

• Product manager

What are Quality Objectives?

Quality objectives explain the basic requirements required to provide software quality. As far as Quality Engineering is concerned, quality objectives often deal with the quality attributes of security, availability, safety, performance and reliability. Using quality models such as ISO/IEC 25000 & methods such as Goal Question Metric approach, attributing metrics to quality objectives becomes a possibility. This enables measuring the exact degree of attainment of these quality objectives.

Well, this seems to be a principal component of the entire Quality Engineering process; at the same time, it serves as a prerequisite for its constant monitoring & control. In order to ensure efficient and effective measuring of quality objectives, integration of core numbers that were manually identified and the automatically identified metrics as a foundation for decision-making becomes favorable.

What are collaborative processes?

The process of quality engineering comprises of all tasks performed manually and in a semi-automated way so as to identify, fulfill & measure any sort of quality features part of a chosen context. Of course, this process is a very much collaborative one as it demands interaction of actors extensively along with acting independently from one another.

The process of quality engineering should integrate with any existing sub-processes which may consist of highly structured processes like IT service management as well as processes that have limited structure like agile software development. Yet another crucial element is change-driven procedure wherein change events like changed requirements are handled within the local context of both information and actors that are affected by such change. And, a pre-requisite for this happens to be methods & tools that support both change propagation and change handling.

Of course, the main objective of a competent quality engineering process appears to be the coordination of automated & manual quality assurance tasks. Examples of manual tasks include code review or quality objectives elicitation while that of automatically performed tasks include regression tests and collection of code metrics.  

The process or sub-processes of quality engineering process can be supported using tools like ticketing systems and security management tools.