Software Evaluation Team

Definition

Software Evaluation Team

the team that evaluates the deliverable software design, implementation, and testing work products that are produced by the software development team and the process used to produce them

Classification

As illustrated in the preceding figure, Software Evaluation Team is part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

• Type: Concrete
• Superclass: Evaluation Team
• Subclasses:
  • None

Responsibilities

The typical team-specific responsibilities of a Software Evaluation Team are to:

• Evaluate the software design document.
• Evaluate the data components.
• Evaluate the software components.
• Evaluate the related test work products.

The software evaluation team typically inherits the common team responsibilities from the team method component.

Roles

The software evaluation team typically consists of persons playing the following roles:

• Technical Leader, who facilitates the evaluation meeting and evaluates the software design and components for technical quality.
• Software Architect, who evaluates the software design for quality and conformance to the software architecture.
• Programmer, who evaluates the software components for quality implementation and for conformance to the coding standards.
• Test Engineer, who evaluates the software components for adequate unit and integration testing.
• Quality Engineer, who evaluates the software components for quality and conformance to the relevant conventions.
• Security Engineer, who evaluates the software components for security requirements and mechanisms.
• User Representative, who evaluates the user interface software components for usability.
• Technical Writer, who acts as scribe at the evaluation meeting, summarizes the evaluation team’s findings in the evaluation summary report, and delivers the report to the software development team.

Tasks

The software evaluation team typically performs the following team-specific tasks in an iterative, incremental, parallel, and time-boxed manner:

• Quality Control – Implementation Evaluation:
  Evaluate the:
  • Software design document.
  • Data components.
  • Software components.
  • Unit and software integration:
    • Test harnesses.
    • Test scripts.
    • Test suites.
    • Test cases.
    • Test data.

The software evaluation team typically inherits the common team tasks from the team method component.

Work Products

The software evaluation team typically produces all or part of the following quality engineering work products:

• Evaluation Report, which documents an individual evaluator’s findings.
• Evaluation Summary Report, which summarizes the finding of the entire evaluation team.

Guidelines

• Evaluations should not devolve into walkthroughs. The work products should stand on their own.
• To the extent practical, the developers of a work product should:
  • Not be the only evaluators of it.
  • Also informally inspect it prior to the evaluation.
• A software evaluation team typically inherits the common team guidelines from the team method component.