Teaching Software Quality Assurance in an Undergraduate Software Engineering Program

industrial processes (often replacing human operators), and many business processes. Unfortunately, software quality assurance is often the poor relation in many organizations. Most developers are not aware of the high cost of inferior quality. At the École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS) in Montréal, Canada, software quality assurance is taught in the lecture format within the software engineering undergraduate curriculum. This curriculum is based on the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). The course stresses the concept of the cost of quality to convince students of the importance of putting in place adequate prevention and appraisal practices in order to reduce software project failures. The lectures cover a wide spectrum of quality assurance techniques and tools. In addition to weekly three-hour lectures, the course includes a project in which students have an opportunity to measure the cost of quality and work with industrial software quality assurance techniques and tools. Universities need to emphasize quality in their programs, but many of them do not. Universities from which practitioners hire could model a software quality course after this one.