Jimali Software Engineering

This book sets out to describe how to perform Software Quality Assurance activities by focusing on the needs of the customer. The book uses a fictitious software company to show how that company's customers view software quality, and how the company attempts to address the quality requirements of the customer. The company builds a "Quality Attributes Set" which describes how the customer views quality assurance, which provides the company with guidelines to address.

Ginac uses the quality attribute set as the centre piece of a discussion about how to implement and run a testing programme that addresses the guidelines. This includes a discussion about metrics, and how to select and/or adapt them to suit.

Ginac discusses the various test methods, types and tools that can be used. He does not make a recommendation about any particular set because they must be selected based on the customers quality requirements.

This book was well written; although I had expected it to be a bit longer than it is. As a software engineer I'm accustomed to thinking of quality assurance in terms of the code that is written for a project => if the code is high quality, then the software as a whole will be high quality. However after reading this book I realised that it is not quite so simple. Having met the customers quality requirements is more likely to keep the customer happy than just having high quality software alone.

What I liked

• Easy to read
• The focus on doing sufficient testing to meet the customers needs
• The way the author discusses how to develop metric to support the testing process
• It helped me to view quality assurance in the broader context

What I disliked There wasn't too much to dislike about this book. I thought that some of Ginac's example requirements were a bit lame; but they show how customers think - which can be contradictory.

Recommendation I would recommend this book to people who are interested in software quality assurance; however it won't suit everybody. I think that this is a good book for software engineers to read because it shows that whilst the code is important, its just as important to meet the customers quality needs, and that good code may only be part of the quality set. My fear with many software engineers is that they can't see past the code. Its unlikely that these types of software engineers will find the book useful.

I think this book will provide useful insight for people charged with implementing and administering a test programme. I plan to use it more in the future when starting new projects in an effort to target the customers needs not just my own.