Environmental Testing Techniques for Software Certification

The problems of developing software requirements and quality assurance techniques have basically dealt with an environment where a single organization acts as the designer, developer, and user of the software product. Since the mid-1970' s, however, there has been a great increase in the use of "packaged" software products designed and developed by one organization for use in a variety of other organizations. The great profusion of products has resulted in many products being peddled for generic applications (accounting, manufacturing, etc.) which are of questionable quality and/or "fit" to a given organization's environment. This paper describes some techniques that are being used to certify software produced by third parties and how to determine if the "fit" is there. Current quality assurance techniques deal with the "correctness" of a program as compared to its specifications [2], [4], [7], [8], [12]. The real issue for a purchaser of software is whether the software is "correct" for its environment.