A Simulation Model of Software Quality Assurance in the Software Lifecycle

Software quality assurance (SQA) is a series of activities within the software development lifecycle that repetitively verify or test the software deliverables to ensure their quality. In this paper, we propose a simulation model of SQA to quantitatively demonstrate the positive effect of adding quality assurance (QA) effort especially in early phases of software development. The proposed model can represent the relationship among the number of bugs in each phase, the amount of QA effort, the expected number of detectable bugs and the amount of bug fixing effort. The model can simulate the different QA strategies in a given software development context; thus, it is useful to identify the best or better strategies to improve software quality with smaller QA and bug fixing effort.