Successful software depends not only on technical excellence but on how members of the software team work together. Written in easy to understand language by a leading expert in the field, this ground-breaking volume provides an overview of the team culture required to develop quality software. Reflecting the different views on the nature of software quality, the book helps groups in a software team to communicate more effectively and to overcome the conflict created by their different perceptions of quality. You learn the roles and activities of team members (including customers) throughout the life of a software product, from before the software development starts and during the software development lifecycle, to after the software has been deployed and is in use.

Software quality is a generalised statement difficult to agree or disagree with until a precise definition of the concept of "Software Quality" is reached in terms of measurable quantities. Unfortunately, for the software technology the basic question of: • what to measure; • how to measure; • when to measure; • how to deal with the data obtained are still unanswered and are also closely dependant on the field of application. In the past twenty years or more there have been a number of conferences and debates focusing on the concept of Software Quality, which produced no real industrial impact. Recently, however, the implementation of a few generic standards (ISO 9000, IEEE etc.) has produced and improved application of good practice principles at the industrial level. As a graduate in PhYSiCS, I still believe it is a long way before the concept of Software Quality can be defined exactly and measured, if ever. This is way I think the AQuIS series of conferences is important, its object begin to provide a platform for the transfer of technology and know how between Academic, Industrial and Research Institutions, in the field of Software Quality. Their objects are: • to provide a forum for the introduction and discussion of new research breakthroughs in Software Quality; • to provide professional Software Quality engineers with the necessary exposure to the results of current research; • to expose the research community to the problems of practical application of new results.

The rapid growth in use of programmable technology, in nearly all sectors of Engineering, is a well-known established trend and one which there is every reason to believe will continue into the foreseeable future. The drivers of this trend include cost, flexibility, rich functionality and certain reliability and safety advantages. However, as explained in this book, these advantages have to be carefully weighed against a number of dis advantages which, amongst other things, have fundamental implications for reliability and safety. Ideally, a programmable system would be viewed as a fusion of hardware, software and user (or 'skinware'), operating under a set of environmental conditions. To date, such a unifying model does not exist and so hardware, software and human factors are still considered largely as three separate disciplines, albeit with certain interdependencies. Established techniques are available which enable the engineer to develop systems comprising purely hardware components to a prescribed reliability and performance. Software, however, is fundamentally different in a number of ways, and does not lend itself to equivalent analysis. A major problem with software is its poor 'visibility', and consequently the great difficulty in understanding and predicting its behaviour in all cir cumstances. This results in the ever-present software design flaws, or 'bugs', which have plagued the software industry from its beginnings.

Explains how software reliability can be applied to software programs of all sizes, functions and languages, and businesses. This text provides real-life examples from industries such as defence engineering, and finance. It is aimed at software and quality assurance engineers and graduate students.