QUALITY SYSTEM FOR PRODUCTION SOFTWARE (QSPS): AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF PRODUCTION SOFTWARE

A quality system for production software should be part of the quality management system of an organization and can be expressed as objectives in the form of processes, procedures, tools and responsibilities, designed and developed to fulfil the quality requirements. These usually are addressing the customers (external or internal), compliance with standards (effectiveness) waste reduction and better use of resources (efficiency) for continual improvement. Such systems are designed according to the requirements of the standards for quality management, software engineering and information security. Quality systems themselves could not provide all necessary means for driving the organization to the quality and excellence of a product. Still there are some gaps in the processes which are not covered by too generic standards and it is the organizational ability to cover the gaps in an appropriate way. The aim of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of our proposed conceptual QSPS model to reduce the gaps in the processes of an organization by enhancing the quality of production software. In order to achieve that goal, a mathematical representation of QSPS has been derived and an evaluation has been realized among different software quality methods. The reliability and validity of the QSPS has been examined through the practical application to the automotive industry considering the elements like: (i) Planning, time and cost evaluation (ii) Software requirements (management, risk, quality and security) (iii) Validation and verification of the implemented software before release (iv) Internal release of the software (v) Client release of the software (vi) Functional monitoring after release in the production and continuous improvement process (vii) Customer satisfaction. The results of mathematical simulation and practical application revealed that the proposed QSPS model showed superior phenomena compared with other known software quality methods and also expressed significant advantages, while using it on the production software. So, an effective application of QSPS would result in the smooth running of the production software to get a high quality product according to customer and standard requirements.