Design and development of an expert system based quality assurance module for the Dynamo Model of software project management

• Main Author: Leidy, Frank H.
• Other Authors: Abdel-Hamid, Tarek K.
• Language: en_US
• Published: Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School 2013
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/25818

Quality assurance is a crucial function to the successful development and maintenance of a software system. Because this activity has a significant impact on the cost of software development, the cost-effectiveness of quality assurance is a major concern to the software quality manager. There are tradeoffs between the economic benefits and costs of quality assurance. Using the Dynamo model of software project management, an optimal quality assurance level and its distribution throughout a project's lifecycle can be identified. The focus of this thesis is to automated the process of identifying the optimum quality assurance level. An expert system was developed that, when interfaced with the Dynamo model, will generate the optimum quality assurance distribution for a given set of parameters. The ability of the expert system to generated more cost-effective quality assurance levels than manually achievable was shown. Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Expert systems; Quality assurance; Simulation. (kt)