Software Quality Assurance (QA) Plan Template

Software QA Plan

A Good Software Quality Assurance program needs forward planning and following through it. The SQA plan defines its goals, tasks to be performed, and the standards and procedures
against which the development work is to be appraised. The purpose of this Software Quality Assurance (SQA) Plan is to establish the goals, processes, and responsibilities required to implement effective quality assurance functions for the project.

The Software Quality Assurance Plan provides the framework necessary to ensure a consistent approach to software quality assurance throughout the project life cycle. It defines the approach that will be used by the SAM and Software Quality (SQ) personnel to monitor and assess software development processes and products to provide objective insight into the maturity and quality of the software. The systematic monitoring of <Project Name> products, processes, and services will be evaluated to ensure they meet requirements and comply with <Project Name> policies, standards, and procedures, as well as applicable Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) standards.

The IEEE standard for SQA plan preparation contains the following:

1. Purpose
2. Reference Documents
3. Management
4. Documentation
5. Standards, Practices, and Conventions
6. Reviews and Audits
7. Software Configuration Management
8. Problem Reporting and Corrective Action
9. Tools, Techniques, and Methodologies
10. Code Control
11. Media Control
12. Supplier Control
13. Records Collection, Maintenance, and Retention

Most of these topics are comparatively clear from their headings, the documentation,
standards sections are given more explaination below.

Documentation

The documentation section should depict the documentation to be created and how
it is to be reviewed. These include but not limited to:

1. Software requirement specification, which defines each software function,
performance parameter, interface, or other attribute with adequate precision to
permit its verification.
2. Software Design Description, which identifies the major components, databases,
and internal interfaces.
3. Software Verification and Validation Plan, which describes the methodologies used to
verify that the requirements are implemented in the design, that the design is
implemented in the code, and that the code meets the requirements.
4. Software system Verification and Validation Report, which is used to report on the SQA
verification and testing activities.
5. User Documentation, which is needed for installation, operation, and
maintenance of the software.
6. Other, includes software development plan, the software configuration
management plan, the standards and procedures manual, along with the
planned preview methods.

Attached file below is an sample quality plan which is mostly used in NASA projects and also IEEE complaint.The original NASA plan has been modified a bit to make it fit for any project.

Download here.