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Rating: 
Summary: For the right audience worth its weight in gold
Review: The title of this remarkable 385-page book might account for its going out of print. It's not about how to develop system with high quality - instead it's a complete blueprint for developing an in-house system for managing quality. This includes issue and metrics management and project planning and control functions. Literally, the author has provided complete plans for a software project and quality management system that would be a welcome addition to any organization with a well-defined SQA function or is operating at a capability level defined by SPICE (Software Process Improvement Capability dEtermination), CMM (Capability Maturity Model), or even a procedures-driven standard such as ISO 9000-3.Chapter 1 gives a complete preliminary plan in the form of dataflow diagrams for the system. This provides a high-level view of the system. Chapter 2, over 70 pages, is the data dictionary. It's well thought-out and takes you one level of abstraction lower in the design. It also serves as the data architecture and can be used to derive a DDL (data definition language) SQL script. Chapter 3, roughly 180 pages, is the heart of not only the system, but how to employ it. This chapter contains process descriptions for major milestones (project initiation, preliminary analysis and design, detailed analysis and design, build and install). The seven appendices cover overview of structured tools and techniques (quaint by today's standards), installing a methodology (as applicable today as when this was written in 1988!), model transformation case study (excellent reading), common questions and answers, rules for reviews (good material), survey/probe projection technique (interesting, but not profound) and business event partitioning (still valid today). Although few of us will probably build the system provided in the book, the design itself and the copious details provided are valuable for specification and design of software quality management systems, and can also be used to develop a checklist of features when comparing commercial off-the-shelf systems. More important, the completeness of the author's design makes it a worthwhile study for determining the "moving parts" of a software quality management system. In my opinion this book was ahead of its time and would be a hot seller into organizations and among practitioners who are grappling with how to obtain tools and systems to support quality initiatives. If you are in that audience this book is worth tracking down.
Rating:
Summary: For the right audience worth its weight in gold
Review: The title of this remarkable 385-page book might account for its going out of print. It's not about how to develop system with high quality - instead it's a complete blueprint for developing an in-house system for managing quality. This includes issue and metrics management and project planning and control functions. Literally, the author has provided complete plans for a software project and quality management system that would be a welcome addition to any organization with a well-defined SQA function or is operating at a capability level defined by SPICE (Software Process Improvement Capability dEtermination), CMM (Capability Maturity Model), or even a procedures-driven standard such as ISO 9000-3. Chapter 1 gives a complete preliminary plan in the form of dataflow diagrams for the system. This provides a high-level view of the system. Chapter 2, over 70 pages, is the data dictionary. It's well thought-out and takes you one level of abstraction lower in the design. It also serves as the data architecture and can be used to derive a DDL (data definition language) SQL script. Chapter 3, roughly 180 pages, is the heart of not only the system, but how to employ it. This chapter contains process descriptions for major milestones (project initiation, preliminary analysis and design, detailed analysis and design, build and install). The seven appendices cover overview of structured tools and techniques (quaint by today's standards), installing a methodology (as applicable today as when this was written in 1988!), model transformation case study (excellent reading), common questions and answers, rules for reviews (good material), survey/probe projection technique (interesting, but not profound) and business event partitioning (still valid today). Although few of us will probably build the system provided in the book, the design itself and the copious details provided are valuable for specification and design of software quality management systems, and can also be used to develop a checklist of features when comparing commercial off-the-shelf systems. More important, the completeness of the author's design makes it a worthwhile study for determining the "moving parts" of a software quality management system. In my opinion this book was ahead of its time and would be a hot seller into organizations and among practitioners who are grappling with how to obtain tools and systems to support quality initiatives. If you are in that audience this book is worth tracking down.
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