Software quality assurance

Software quality assurance (SQA) is a means and practice of monitoring all software engineeringprocesses, methods, and work products to ensure compliance against defined standards. It may include ensuring conformance to standards or models, such as ISO/IEC 9126 (now superseded by ISO 25010), SPICE, or Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).

It includes standards and procedures that managers, administrators or developers may use to review and audit software products and activities to verify that the software meets quality criteria which link to standards.

As a part of software assurance. SQA encompasses the entire software development process, including requirements engineering, software design, coding, code reviews, source code control, software configuration management, testing, release management and software integration. It is organized into goals, commitments, abilities, activities, measurements, verification and validation.