Quality Assurance of Digital Systems

Learning Outcomes

The course focuses on digital system quality concepts and related quality models. It also deepens into architectural design with the aim of achieving quality objectives, testing during development, and functional and quality testing following the development of digital systems. The course also studies metrics related to the quality of digital systems.

Upon completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Name and describe what are the various aspects of the quality of a digital system (internal and external).
• State what are the quality properties of digital systems and what are the ways to ensure them.
• Describe how middleware technologies contribute to the quality of digital systems.
• Design and develop service-oriented architectures (Service Oriented Architectures) to improve the quality of digital systems.
• Follow a standard architectural design process and apply architectural standards.
• Check the quality of digital systems by applying software quality and complexity metrics such as Chidamber & Kemerer’s suite of 6 metrics.
• Implement a digital systems audit program.
• Use open software efficiently when developing digital systems with the aim of improving their quality.
• Use methods of collaborative development of digital systems to improve their quality.
• Use static code analysis tools when developing digital systems.
• Report promising future directions in digital systems quality.

Indicative Module Content

• Introduction to digital systems quality
• Quality properties and ways to ensure them.
• Middleware technologies
• Service-oriented architectures.
• Architectural design process and architectural patterns.
• Quality metrics
• Digital system testing and related concepts.
• Introduction to open-source software
• Collaborative development of digital systems.
• Static code analysis
• Future directions related to digital systems quality