Laboratory practice with software quality assurance

Students and indeed many practicing software professionals are often sceptical of the benefits of software quality assurance. Organizations which have experienced the benefits for themselves are in no doubt. In the Software Engineering major at the Queensland University of Technology, a Software Quality Assurance unit has been introduced. We have attempted to give students some practical experience by combining the practical work for this unit with project work from other units in the major. The quality assurance students interact with project students in reviews and walk throughs of baseline documents. Our experience with this experiment is described, and we draw some tentative conclusions.