scope:

GENERAL

The NASA Software Assurance Guidebook classifies the software quality assurance (SQA) audit as a fundamental quality assurance technique. It is the intent of this guidebook to further define audits, describe the audit process, and provide a sample checklist that can be tailored for use in an audit. The guidebook is written for quality assurance practitioners who will perform audits, software developers who will be audited, and for software project managers and acquirers who have to decide the extent of auditing to be done.

In this guidebook, the term "audit" specifically refers to an SQA technique that is used to examine the conformance of a development process to procedures and the conformance of products to standards. An SQA audit also can examine the conformance of the actual status of the development activity to the reported status. The term "audit" is used to describe a number of additional software  activities; however, due to their different purpose and focus, they are not addressed in this guidebook. For example, the Functional Configuration Audit (FCA) and Physical Configuration Audit (PCA) are configuration management (CM) activities. Quality (Engineering) Audits and Safety Audits are technical activities that evaluate a software product against Quality Engineering and Safety requirements. These types of audits are not covered in this guidebook.