Quality assurance (QA) entails all efforts with which the quality of software can be improved as early as possible, including requirements engineering, software design, coding, code reviews, source code management, configuration management, testing, release management and integration of software.
Many of the efforts related to QA can be considered as routine tasks, and could thus be automated. However, building automation to support QA is time and resource consuming activity. Implementing QA automation requires competence and the benefits will be experienced with delay. With successful QA automation, however, organizations can save time and money. The more often and more extensively automatic quality assurance is performed, the more time is saved, and consequently more money is saved. This enables software engineers to use their time to other activities.
The QA competence of software companies could be increased by intensifying collaboration between software companies and university of applied science. The benefits would be mutual. Software engineering students would be able to learn real-life software development contexts and build ties with local software companies already while studying. Regional software companies, on the other hand, would benefit from students exploring latest QA topics and
technologies.
In order to increase shared understanding about QA tools and technologies, this project seeks to establish Xamk Software Quality Assurance Workshop. The project focuses particularly to:
- Developing new collaborative models between South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (Xamk) and software companies in South Savo to share QA related knowledge and to guide further exploration.
- Developing virtual Software Quality Assurance Workshop that allows access for students and software companies to use QA-related tools.
In the long term, the project improves the viability of software industry in the region and the ability for applied university to respond for the needs of regional software companies.