The concept and practice of software quality assurance in Japan in the global era

The Japanese computer industry in 1990s was hit with two major shocks at the same time. One shock was the drastic reform of computers and of network. The other shock was from the collapse of the booming Japanese economy that had constantly been growing at a high rate. We present quality assurance measures with software development from Hitachi, Ltd. First is constructing a framework to cope with globalization and social and economic reforms while taking advantage of the factory system, which is a characteristic of the Japanese industry. Second is reinforcing risk control, which has been a weak point of Japan, reinforcing the technology and control of upstream processes including preventing specification instability by utilizing quality function deployment and a system for quality improvement utilizing a review report, and reinforcing system simulation testing to assure the quality of information systems consisting of many black box product families and networks.