Need for Software Quality Assurance

A software problem contributed to a rail car fire in a major underground metro system in April of 2007 according to newspaper accounts. The software reportedly failed to perform as expected in detecting and preventing excess power usage in equipment on a new passenger rail car, resulting in overheating and fire in the rail car, and evacuation and shutdown of part of the system.
A May 2005 newspaper article reported that a major hybrid car manufacturer had to install a software fix on 20,000 vehicles due to problems with invalid engine warning lights and occasional stalling. In the article, an automotive software specialist indicated that the automobile industry spends $2 billion to $3 billion per year fixing software problems.
As software spreads from computers into aircrafts, automobiles, medical equipments and elsewhere, bugs (defects) are no longer a problem to be managed. They must be predicted in advance and prevented or else unanticipated uses will lead to unintended consequences. This highlights the importance of Software Quality Assurance (QA) and Software testing.
Software QA involves the complete software development process – monitoring and improving the process, ensuring that any defined standards and procedures are followed, and making sure that problems are found and dealt with. It focuses on ’prevention’.
Testing involves operation of a system or application under controlled, predefined conditions and evaluating the results.
The controlled conditions should include both normal and abnormal conditions. Testing should intentionally attempt to make
things go wrong to determine if things don’t happen when they should or things happen when they shouldn’t. Here main focus is on “detection”