Software quality assurance: Testing and validation

Abstract

There are many pitfalls for the unwary hardware engineer who must develop software. In particular, hardware quality control procedures and concepts can easily be misapplied. The purpose of this paper is to help hardware-oriented engineers apply some of the quality assurance lessons learned by software engineers. We first discuss how software is and is not analogous to hardware, and then outline recommended software engineering approaches for developing high-quality software products. We concentrate on methods for preventing and detecting software error.