Darrel Ince, An Introduction to Software Quality Assurance and its Implementation
(England: McGraw-Hill Book Company Europe, 1994, 202 pages)

The author is a Professor of Computing at the Open University, which is located in the U.K. He is the author of 21 books on software topics. While giving numerous seminars to audiences of computer professionals, the author was continually asked for a recommendation of a good introductory book on software quality assurance. This book was an attempt to fulfill this request.

The book contains information on how to set up a quality system, how to write standards and procedures, and how to review and improve the quality system that you have. The book covers many questions that are asked about software quality assurance. These questions include the following:

• What does ISO 9001 mean in software terms?
• How can I judge whether a software sub-contractor has a good quality system?
• We have a virtually non-existent quality system. What areas should we address first?
• We are adopting object-oriented technology. What modifications should we apply to our quality system to cater for this?
• What is the best way to implement a quality system: should we hire a consultant or let our development staff have a go?
• How do you write a standard?
• I know that testing is something to do with quality assurance, but where does it fit into a quality system?
• We have so many problems with changes on our software projects. What do we need to do to implement some discipline?
• We currently have a quality system, but how do we improve it?
• We have had major problems with requirement specifications. How can we write a standard that improves them?
• What is the best way to check a design against a requirement specification?

This book is part of a series. The series of books, published by The Quality Assurance Forum jointly with McGraw Hill, aims to provide an opportunity for authors to publish works which are both practical and state-of-the-art. This series of books is meant to help QA Forum members and other organizations benefit from the exchange of information and the development of new ideas which will further the cause of quality in Information Technology.