Prototyping and Quality Assurance

Pre final SD

Software quality

Degree to which a software product meets the gathered requirements.

Software quality assurance

Set of activities that define and assess the adequacy of software process to provide evidence which establishes confidence that the software processes are appropriate for and produce software products of suitable quality for their intended processes.

Reputation

Software developers and their organizations rely on this. Software bugs can have immediate impacts on clients or customers.

Limiting Technical Debt

Poor quality software tends to be expensive to develop and maintain, which can negatively affect organizations or end up maintaining the software in the longer term.

Software Certification

The development and use of the software might require some form of certification, which can often require evidence of the application of various quality control and assessment measures.

Legality

There may be overriding legal obligations that apply to organizations that use the software. As such, every practicable measure must be taken to demonstrate that the software system does not pose a risk to its users.

Ethical Codes of Practice

In cases where a software system is not covered by software certification and legislation, and where its failure is not necessarily business or safety-critical, there can remain moral obligation to the users. This implies that software engineers should do whatever is possible to maximize the quality of their software and to prevent it from containing potentially harmful bugs.

Software prototyping

Refers to building software application prototypes which displays the functionality of the product under development, but may not actually hold the exact logic of the original software.

Throwaway Prototyping

This is a relatively fast method of prototyping that focuses on employing prototypes to generate insights about the software design idea. The created prototypes on this paradigm are discarded after testing and after obtaining feedback.

Evolutionary Prototyping

The prototypes on this paradigm are reused after the testing in a way that they are altered according to the test results and then reused in a new test cycle. This evolves to become the end product itself.

Low-Fidelity Prototyping

Its role is to check and test the visual appearance and user flows of a software. A throwaway prototype can be created.

Paper-Based Prototyping

This prototyping technique is used to create a prototype based on hand drawings that represent user interfaces of the software.

Wireframing

Visual representation of a product page that developers can use to arrange pages of user interfaces.

High-Fidelity Prototyping

Created when developers have a solid understanding of what they are going to build. They need to test it with the actual users.