The classic responsibility of quality assurance is to provide visibility into the processes being followed on the projects for the management team at all levels and to determine if they are efficient and effective and producing the necessary product quality to satisfy customer, competitor, organization, or project quality goals. Figure 5.2 shows SQA participating in three distinct but related directions. The first direction is to management, as just described. The second direction is to the developers. This responsibility is inadequately executed worldwide based on my experience of assessments and process improvement consulting.

Figure 5.2: SQA Agent for process improvement.

Quality assurance engineering or responsibles should provide feedback to the individual projects and project members on the efficiency and effectiveness of the processes that the project members are required to follow so that they can be improved at the project level as necessary. The third direction is when the quality assurance engineers find that project members are indeed faithfully following the organizational processes but they are not efficient or effective and/or they are not producing the required product quality. In this case the quality assurance engineers are responsible for providing this feedback to the process group so that these processes can be improved at the organizational level.

In addition to the process compliance and process improvement aspect of quality assurance, some basic quality assurance roles and responsibilities include:

• Assisting the project manager in developing quality goals;

• Assisting the project manager in creating the project's quality plan;

• Supporting the project...