Ensuring the quality and maintainability of software elements

Summary form only given. A major impact on software development has been the increasing acceptance of systematic and structured system design approaches such as SSADM (Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method). However, they do little to ensure the quality and maintainability of the final implemented software elements. Two software engineering approaches have been developed by researchers within the Commercial Software Engineering Group at Sunderland Polytechnic to address these problems. The first method termed Structured Technique for Program Specification (STePS), uses the products of a method such as SSADM to identify the programs in a system and then using well-established design techniques develops the specification for the software components of these programs. The second approach is the use of a software quality assurance tool which checks the developed code against the well defined installation standards which will have been included in the STePS specification