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Software Quality Assurance (QA) is the process of ensuring that the software being built has the required levels of quality.
While testing is the most common activity used in QA, there are other complementary techniques such as static analysis, code reviews, and formal verification.
Quality Assurance = Validation + Verification
QA involves checking two aspects:
Whether something belongs under validation or verification is not that important. What is more important is both are done, instead of limiting to verification (i.e., remember that the requirements can be wrong too).
Code review is the systematic examination code with the intention of finding where the code can be improved.
Reviews can be done in various forms. Some examples below:
In
Pair Programming:
Pair programming is an agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. One, the driver, writes code while the other, the observer or navigator, reviews each line of code as it is typed in. The two programmers switch roles frequently. [source: Wikipedia]
A good introduction to pair programming:
Pull Request reviews
Formal inspections
Inspections involve a group of people systematically examining a project artifacts to discover defects. Members of the inspection team play various roles during the process, such as:
Advantages of code reviews over testing:
Disadvantages:
Static analysis: Static analysis is the analysis of code without actually executing the code.
Static analysis of code can find useful information such unused variables, unhandled exceptions, style errors, and statistics. Most modern IDEs come with some inbuilt static analysis capabilities. For example, an IDE can highlight unused variables as you type the code into the editor.
Higher-end static analyzer tools can perform for more complex analysis such as locating potential bugs, memory leaks, inefficient code structures etc.
Some example static analyzer for Java:
Linters are a subset of static analyzers that specifically aim to locate areas where the code can be made 'cleaner'.
Formal verification uses mathematical techniques to prove the correctness of a program.
by Eric Hehner
Advantages:
Disadvantages: