Establishing standards and
procedures for software development is critical, since these provide the
framework from which the software evolves. Standards are the
established criteria to which the software products are compared.
Procedures are the established criteria to which the development and
control processes are compared. Standards and procedures establish the
prescribed methods for developing software; the SQA role is to ensure their
existence and adequacy.Proper documentation of standards and
procedures is necessary since the SQA activities of process monitoring, product
evaluation and auditing rely upon unequivocal definitions to measure project
compliance. Types of standards include:
Documentation Standards
specify form and content for planning, control, and product documentation and
provide consistency throughout a project. The NASA Data Item Descriptions (DIDs)
are documentation standards.
Design Standards
specify the form and content of the design product.They
provide rules and methods for translating the software requirements into the
software design and for representing it in the design documentation.
Code Standards
specify the language in which the code is to be written and define any
restrictions on use of language features. They define legal
language structures, style conventions, rules for data structures and
interfaces, and internal code documentation. Procedures are explicit steps to be
followed in carrying out a process. All processes should have documented
procedures. Examples of processes for which procedures are needed are
configuration management, nonconformance reporting and corrective action,
testing, and formal inspections.
If developed according to the
NASA DID, the Management Plan describes the software development control
processes, such as configuration management, for which there have to be
procedures, and contains a list of the product standards. Standards are to be
documented according to the Standards and Guidelines DID in the Product
Specification. The planning activities required to assure
that both products and processes comply with designated standards and procedures
are described in the QA portion of the Management Plan.