TABLE OF CONTENTS Specification Quality Control (SQC) is the name I shall use to refer to this method in this text. Within the software community, the term Inspection is used. However, it is a poor choice for engineering communities, which already use inspection in another sense during final production line quality control. SQC is remote from such assembly-line inspections, as it takes place from the earliest stages of idea specification and has different organizational impacts (for example, team building and assisting in on the job training).
The primary purpose of SQC is systems engineering process control through sampling measurement of specification quality. Through SQC, we can improve systems engineering processes, save project time and increase systems engineering productivity.
Control of projects, designs, strategies, marketing, selling and buying, management planning, and programming, all have one thing in common at least they rely on ideas specified by people, and read by people. If those ideas are misunderstood by the reader, incomplete, wrongly written or out of date, then we are doomed to lose control and be less competitive, no matter how well we design, plan and implement!
For software, studies have long since shown that a considerable percentage (44% at Bellcore (Pence and Hon 1993) and 62% (Thayer, Lipow and Nelson 1978)) of all bugs in computer programs were not due to faulty programming. They were due to faulty requirements and design being handed to the programmers and the testers. In many cases, the...
