Software Quality Assurance is a process designed to ensure that software is developed that meets the original customer requirements and has high quality upon delivery to production. Why does software have bugs? Miscommunication or NO Communication - For high quality, you must first know the specifics of what an application should or shouldn't do (the application's requirements). Click here to see how Defect Tracker or Software Planner can help with requirements. Software Complexity - The complexity of current software applications can be difficult to comprehend for anyone without experience in modern-day software development. Windows-type interfaces, client-server and distributed applications, data communications, enormous relational databases, and sheer size of applications have all contributed to the exponential growth in software/system complexity. And the use of object-oriented techniques can complicate instead of simplify a project unless it is well-engineered. Programming Errors - Programmers, like anyone else, can make mistakes. It is important to fully test all requirements and to have a defect tracking solution that allows programmers to fix defects that are found by the quality assurance team. Click here to see how Defect Tracker or Software Planner can help with managing test cases and here to see how it allows quality assurance teams to track defects and manage software quality assurance. Changing requirements (whether documented or undocumented) - The customer may not understand the effects of changes, or may understand and request them anyway - redesign, rescheduling of engineers, effects on other projects, work already completed that may have to be redone or thrown out, hardware requirements that may be affected, etc. If there are many minor changes or any major changes, known and unknown dependencies among parts of the project are likely to interact and cause problems, and the complexity of coordinating changes may result in errors. Enthusiasm of engineering staff may be affected. In some fast-changing business environments, continuously modified requirements may be a fact of life. In this case, management must understand the resulting risks, and QA and test engineers must adapt and plan for continuous extensive testing to keep the inevitable bugs from running out of control. Click here to see how Defect Tracker or Software Planner can help with requirements management. Time Pressures - Scheduling of software projects is difficult at best, often requiring a lot of guesswork. When deadlines loom and the crunch comes, mistakes will be made. Click here to see how Software Planner can help with Project Tasks