Software Quality and Process Improvement

The course gives a broad introduction to quality assurance and process improvement and is based on TQM's ideas for these areas. For quality assurance, the course focuses on the standards from ISO and IEEE and how to introduce quality assurance based on ISO 9001.
For process improvement, the course will focus on goal oriented, risk based improvement, based on data. This includes collection and analysis of qualitative and qualitative data from projects and organizations in the IT industry, decision under uncertainty, cost – benefit analysis and risk handling during the decision process.
The course content is presented through method lectures and presentation of cases from Norwegian and international IT-industry.

When finishing the course, the student will have knowledge of:

Quality assurance:
- How to do a quality audit and write an audit report
- ISO 9001, ISO 90003 and IEEE Std 730 for quality assurance, how to introduce quality assurance in a company and how to go from the standard's requirements to concrete procedures.
- Product quality assessment according to ISO 9126.
- Challenges from applying ISO 9001 to agile development processes.

Knowledge based process improvement:
- Risk analysis, based on ALARP and GALE
- Process improvement based on subjective and objective data
- Data collection for process improvement – subjective data, using SWOP, gap analysis and the Delphi method – and objective data, using GQM
- Analysis of qualitative data – using e.g. affinity diagrams and root cause analysis (RCA) – and analysis of quantitative data using statistical methods.

The course has three hours of lecturing each week. In addition there are three mandatory exercises to be done in groups of three to five persons. One of these – writing an essay – counts for 30% of the grade.