PROFICIENCE, CENTRE FOR CONTINUING EDUCATION,

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE, BANGALORE

JAN-MAY 2007
Course: SOFTWARE QUALITY ASSURANCE AND MANAGEMENT

Date: 12th May 2007. Time: 10am – 1pm

1. Answer all questions. Different sections carry different marks.

2. Use calculators wherever required.

SECTION ONE. Objective questions (20 X 2 marks)

Note: This section may have multiple answers to a given question. Answer carefully. No
partial marks will be given.

1. Configuration management is NOT the process of

A. Planning the release of items for the selected life cycle

B. Evaluating and scheduling changes to configurable items
C. Recording and reporting the status of configuration items
D. Verifying the completeness of configurable items
E. All of the above.

2. An activity that verifies compliance with policies and procedures is:

A. an inspection
B. an audit
C. a review
D. an assessment

3. Goals of a metric program are:

A. Improve project planning

B. Increase defect containment at every phase
C. Reduce the cost of non-conformance
D. Increase the project management effort

4. The mission statement for a software quality function would best focus on:

A. Reducing man power cost at periodic intervals.

B. Assessing the performance of software engineers and providing feedback to the management.
C. Companywide and departmental activities that would collectively result in product and/ or
service quality
D. Leading small teams that break down communication barrier between project teams.

5. The purpose of ISO 9001 standard is to:

A. Provide confidence in quality management systems by offering a common basis for

assessments
B. Provide confidence to customers and other stakeholders that the requirements for quality are
being or will be met.

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C. Systematically pursue ever higher levels of overall company and human performance,
including quality, productivity and schedule performance
D. Build loyalties and team work while encouraging and supporting initiative and risk taking

6. Categorizing the cost of quality into failure costs, appraisal costs and prevention costs is
essential to be able to:

A. Reduce the total cost of quality to as near zero as possible

B. Allocate efforts to effectively balance reduction of failures with detection of failures, as well as
preventing failures.
C. Substantially increase appraisal costs to detect failures before shipment
D. Virtually eliminate appraisal costs by adding more to prevention efforts.

7. Arrange in a right sequence the following events, from beginning to end, for taking effective
root cause analysis for a problem.

A. Use the Cause And Effect Diagram

B. Develop a Long Term Solution
C. Gather data to identify the problem
D. Put an immediate remedy in place to contain further damage.

8. Which of the following is the most effective and direct technique for measuring customer
value?

A. Focus Groups
B. Market Surveys
C. Trade Off Analysis
D. In Person Interview

9. The Vice President of your company has requested that you attend the upcoming Change
Control Board (CCB) meeting that is planned this week. Why do you think CCB is necessary?

A. To approve or reject changes to the project plan

B. To approve or reject change requests when required
C. To approve or reject changes to the estimation
D. To approve or reject the selection of project team resources.

10. You have been asked to execute a process improvement project in the current code review
activity in your organization. What are the following tools that are required for your project?

A. Process Flow Diagrams

B. Fish Bone Analysis
C. Brainstorming
D. Microsoft Project Plan

11. The following are the new changes in CMMI Ver 1.2.

A. Common features and advanced practices are not present.

B. Integrated Supplier Management is integrated with Supplier Agreement Management
C. Hardware Amplifications are removed.
D. Decision Analysis and Resolution Process Area is present.

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12. All of the following are true quality statements EXCEPT:

A. Computer Aided Design systems can improve quality, but it will certainly increase the
appraisal and rework cost.
B. Project Quality Management practice should address both Project execution and Product
Development.
C. Quality Objectives of the organization should be aligned with the project quality requirements.
D. Quality improvement depends on the better definition of requirements and increased
awareness of interdependencies between requirements.

13. Why the project plan is important in change control?

A. The project plan documents the baseline that changes are managed against.
B. The project plan provides the trigger for change management
C. The project plan facilitates the stakeholder involvement in project execution.
D. The project plan is also part of change control mechanism.

14. Out of the following, which are only the guidelines against which you cannot get a
certification?

A. ISO 90003
B. IEEE 1042
C. IEEE 730
D. ISO 9004

15. The following are the quality parameters for product operations

A. Integrity
B. Usability
C. Reliability
D. Maintainability

16. Bottom Up, Top down, Big-Bang and Sandwich techniques are different strategies followed
in

A. Unit Testing
B. Integration Testing
C. Smoke Testing
D. Monkey Testing

17. Among the following, who cannot perform the role of independent reviewer in software
inspections?

A. Author
B. Moderator
C. Tester
D. Customer

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18. The purpose of quality auditing program is

A. Provide Management objective feedback

B. Identify problems early in the life cycle
C. Determine if the written procedures followed
D. Help preventing the unfit products reaching the customer

19. Which pair of the following measure is most useful for indicating the overall state of a
process?

A. Conformance to Specifications and Effort Variance

B. Conformance to Specifications and Statistical Control
C. Cycle Time and Cost of Quality
D. Cycle Time and Schedule Variance

20. An internal audit should be designed primarily to answer which of the following questions?

A. Is the process effective?

B. What is the degree of management compliance?
C. How can the process be more efficient?
D. What is the overall level of compliance?

SECTION 2 TRUE/FALSE (10 X 1 mark)

1. ISO 9126 standard has five parts, namely Quality Model, External Metrics, Internal Metrics,
Logical Metrics and Quality in Use metrics.
2. In statistical process control, statistics are used for determining whether the process is within
acceptable variance from standards.
3. CMMI does not prescribe or dictate any life cycle models to be used in executing software
projects.
4. Quality Assurance is designed primarily to detect and correct defects, while quality control is
oriented towards preventing defects from occurring.
5. Most of the time, staff from the independent software quality assurance department make good
moderators in inspection.
6. Code reviews should also include reviewing the structure of the program, use of variables and
logic, but the adherence to coding standards is not essential in general.
7. Creating a baseline in Software Configuration Management is to maintain the integrity of the
set of artifacts.
8. Modified object is checked-out to the project database after modification and version control
mechanisms are used to create the next version of the software.
9. Status accounting in configuration management facilitates the configuration audit function.
10. Basic project management processes are established to track cost, schedule and functionality
when the organization is assessed at CMMI Level 2.

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SECTION 3 Cross word Puzzle (20 X 1mark)

1,13 17
2 16
3

14 4,15 11
12
5
6
7 20
10
8 18 19

Row:
1. Apex document in ISO (13)
2.Quality parameter for ease of use(8)
3. A type of configuration audit for verifying the critical requirements during release (9)
4. A type of verification mechanism conducted for specifications (6)
5. Quality parameter for ease of moving between different environments (11)
6. A type of audit conducted by members belonging to the same organization (8)
7. A CMMI representation that has maturity levels (6)
8. A process of evaluating a system at the end of development by the customers in general (10)
9. Reviews are part of this cost in Cost of Quality measurement(9)
10. 'Vital Few, Trivial many' principle (6)
11. Primary objective of Toyota Production System is _________ elimination.(5)
12. A type of testing of the software according to requirements specification without the knowledge
of internal working.(8)

Down:
13. This process are _______ managed at CMMI Level 4.(14)
14. A type of configuration audit for ensuring the correct versions are sent during the release(8)
15. This analysis should be done for any major complaints or issues reported by the customer.(4)
16. Quality parameter for the security of the software(9)
17. An independent verification for the adherence to the process (5)
18. Toyota Production System is based on these principles(4)
19. Quality Measure for ease of testing ( 11, Reversed)
20. A deviation or non conformance (6)

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SECTION 4 Case Analysis ( 6 X 5 marks)

International Software Solutions (ISS) is software Services Company involved in providing

various software solutions to the customers located across the globe. ISS does not have a
dedicated Software Quality Assurance team in their organization. Senior managers and project
managers used to take care of this function. However, over a period they felt that they could not
focus much on these activities and wanted to recruit five SQA professionals. They came to know
about the Proficience through internet and wanted to hire two members from the current batch.

Before coming to India for interviews, they want to verify the knowledge level of the students on
software quality assurance and management practices by giving a questionnaire as given below.
Given the opportunity, as a student, explain your approach to the case and maximize your chances
to get recruited with ISS. The salary offered is $75000 per annum with other benefits.

1. ISS gives you a target to improve the schedule adherence to 90% for all its development
projects. As a software quality assurance engineer, you need to identify the right metrics in the
development process and different ways to control the schedule variance and improve the
schedule adherence. Use Goal-Question-Metric approach.

2. You have studied in Metrics and CMMI that software improvement starts by identifying the
main process goals and then finding the sub process goals that can be used to measure the
satisfaction of the identified goals. Can you help ISS in identifying few metrics for the following
goals using the Main Process-Sub Process objectives?

a. Productivity Improvement
b. Defect Removal Efficiency
c. Service Level Agreement

3. ISS is currently ISO 9001: 2000 certified. However, the external auditor who comes every
year for the surveillance audit advises them to go for CMMI Ver 1.2 implementation for better
results. They could not understand why their current processes won’t deliver the results. Based
on your knowledge, can you suggest them five critical actions that are recommended in CMMI
Ver 1.2 , but are missing in ISO 9001:2000?

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4. The following is the general defects statistics from ISS organization. Based on the tables below
where do you think they stand in the overall software development life cycle? Find out the real
root causes and offer possible counter solutions for each. State your assumptions clearly.
Defects Defects
Defects Type Distribution Review Type Found
Missing Requirements 15% Requirement Review 15%
Conflict Requirements 10% Design Review 15%
Poor Architecture 5% Code Review 20%
Coding Standards not followed 10% Testing 40%
Poor Test Cases 15% Customer Testing 10%
Poor Database Design 15%
Missing Functionalities in
source code 15%
Wrong CR implementation 15%

5. They have the following numbers that we have collected over a period. They pay $50 per hour
for the developers. It is observed that any defect that is fixed within the organization at any phase
costs us $25 and any defect that goes to the customer costs $125.
One thousand lines of source code will take about 50 hours of effort for a four-person team at the
recommended preparation and inspection rates of 150 lines per hour.
A 35-page design or requirements document will take about 50 hours of effort for a five-person
team at the recommended rate of seven pages per hour for preparation and inspection.

Referring to this data and the previous question number 4 in this case, please suggest whether the
reviews are adding value to their business or they can get out of review practices. State your
assumptions clearly.

6. A product development has taken 30 person months for requirement development, 35 person
months for design, 50 person months for construction, and 40 person months for testing. 15
person months were spent on reviews, walkthroughs, inspections and project management. 10
person months were spent on rework, out of which 3 person months are spent on customer
reported problems. Total number of lines produced was 85000.The initial estimate for the project
was 20 person years for developing 100,000 lines of code.
a) What is the difference between estimated productivity and actual productivity?
b) Find out the overall Cost of Quality and Cost of Poor Quality for this product development.
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