Work in Progress Paper: Learning Software Quality Assurance using Audits

• Main Authors: Wade, Pauline, Hammond, Tracy, Anwar, Saira
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: audit; audits; Industries; ISO; ISO Standards; Organizations; Product design; quality audit; software engineering; Software quality; software quality assurance; Systematics
• ISSN: 2377-634X
• DOI: 10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10342642

Despite the role that Software Quality Assurance (SQA) plays in developing a quality software product, the techniques taught in undergraduate software engineering (SE) courses are learned superficially. This is evident from new professionals entering industry who lack the skills to consistently implement SQA practices [2] The purpose of this study is to assess the effectiveness of a technique called audits in improving students' ability to learn the SQA process. Organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) use audits to assess an organization's development process maturity [17]. These audits follow a systematic process which involves a verbal inquiry of the workflow of the specified development process to produce product feature(s). In this work-in-progress (WIP) paper, we hypothesize that the use of audits as a pedagogy technique improves students' ability to learn SQA techniques and will allow them to apply them in industry projects. We also hypothesize that students' learning of SQA through audits will have a positive correlation with their ability to develop quality products. This paper advances the literature on the use of audits, used in industry to institutionalize processes effective in producing quality products, as a pedagogical technique in an undergraduate SE course at Texas A&M University, a large R1 university.