A comprehensive framework for customizing quality assurance techniques

Quality of the final software product is one of the most decisive factors that determine the market success of a company. Many companies, especially small and medium sized enterprises, need to carefully consider the time and efforts they spent on quality assurance techniques, as resources and time-to-market are often short. Consequently, analytic techniques such as testing and inspections need to be customized to the special company and project constraints. The success of the quality assurance efforts is then determined by the result of the customization process. To perform such a non-trivial customization task it is important to know those factors that influence the customization, the adjustment-screws or variation factors of the techniques and the impact of the adjustment on the quality of the software. In this report we present a comprehensive framework that summarizes these factors. The framework supports practitioners in the customization process by showing all the influential constraints that need to be considered. Based on this, decisions can be made on how to implement quality assurance techniques that match a given development context. A detailed decision support process will be developed in future activities based on the framework presented in this report.