First of all, the auditor must understand the business logic or objective of the software project and what end products are to be produced. The auditor must need to understand the contractual requirements for the deliverable software, documentation, project management, software engineering and quality assurance practices. After understanding these requirements, the auditor should review the software project plan, configuration management plan, quality assurance plan, risk tracker, staffing and training plan, development processes etc. to understand the processes or procedures being followed for the software development.

The review of status reports from the development team is helpful to understand the stage of completeness of products and may contain useful information from the audit point of view. After understanding the project and its current status, the auditor needs to define the critical areas that require the detailed attention. The source of this information may be status reports, minutes of meeting of the review meetings with client or management, non-conformance reports and results of previous audits.

The auditor / lead auditor must inform the auditee team about the intent / scope of audit including the date and time of audit.

Now, the next task for the auditor is to prepare a checklist. Basically, the checklists act as a road map during the actual audit. So, the checklists must include all checkpoints and questions to be asked from the auditee.

Generally, the checklist is already available in the Quality Management System. However, the checklist must be tailored for the specific project to be audited.

Regarding the checklists, my views are:

• General Audit – a comprehensive and less detailed checklist
• Limited Audit – a more detailed checklist in the specific area
• Internal Quality Audit – a detailed checklist in all the relevant areas

The quality of the audit is directly proportional to the quality of the checklist prepared. The checklists are very critical to the success of audit. These checklists are also very helpful for the auditee to understand the type of questions and records the auditor will examine.

Product Defects: Product Defects are the defects that are introduced and detected during the various stages of software development life cycle. While the defects get introduced during the various activities of the phase, the detection occurs during reviews and various types of testing efforts. The various types of defects occuring during the SDLC activities can be categorized as follows:

- Functionality Errors
- External Interface Errors
- Performance Problems
- Environment Errors

Examples of SDLC defects:

Requirements: Performance Exceptions of the system not properly defined
Design: Program Specifications did not specify of number of decimal places
Design: Architecture was not perperly planned
Coding: Variable no initialized, Missing if condition

Process Defects: Process defects are caused during execution of project and usually detected during audits. While such defects get introduced during various project activities and get detected during various conducted during the project life cycle. All such defects are of the nature of deviations in process implementations of the organization or the project. Though it is difficult to draw a co-relation between process and product defects, however, the existence of process defects are indicative of larger number of product defects. Also, existence of such defects raise a question mark about the quality of the software product.

Examples of Process Defects:

- Risk Management Plan is not in place
- Change request impact on schedule and effort not reflected
- Project Management Plan not kept up to date with current status of the project
- Requirements tracking is incomplete
- Review Plan is not adequate
- Requirements gathering strategy not defined for the product
- Quality goals are not tracked
- Issue tracking mechanism is adhoc

Date: 21-July-09

Location: Pune

Education & Experience: Any Graduate with 4-6 years of experience

Position: Asst Manager-  Quality (Black Belt)

Desired skills:

• Completed BB Training or Black belt certified.
• Completed at least 1 BB project successfully.
• Mentoring the GB, Lean & YB projects.
• Training the GBs.
• Should be from quality department only. Not from Operations.

If you are interested, please mail your resume at vinod@viaah.in along with the following details:

• Academic Background:
• Current Salary:
• Expected Salary:
• Joining time:
• Current contact no:
• Reason for Looking Change:
• The tools used for implementing projects:

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