A Knowledge-based Advisory System for Software Quality Assurance

Software quality assurance is a planned and systematic approach to ensure that software processes and products confirms to the established standards, processes, and procedures. The goals of software quality assurance are to improve software quality by appropriately monitoring both software and the development process to ensure full compliance with the established standards and procedures. There are several models for software quality assurance, such as the ISO/IEC 90003, and the capability maturity model integration. However, the proper implementation of these models is often a difficult and a costly task for software companies especially small and medium ones. This paper describes a prototype knowledge-based advisory system designed to play the role of a “virtual quality editor” to help individuals, organizations, and software companies who desire to implement these quality models. By identifying the gauging absence of prerequisites between the prerequisites and what actually exists in the present environment, this advisory system provides assessment results and suggestions to the companies so that successful implementation of these quality models can be achieved. Component object model technology is used in designing and integrating the different components of the prototype system to assure software interoperability between these components. The architecture, the development and the implementation of the prototype system are discussed in details. A typical example is also presented to demonstrate the application of the prototype system.