The role of the Software Quality Assurance (SQA) within an organization has always been critical one. This is also a role which has seen a rapid evolution over the last decade or so. We have seen the SQA role move from being primarily responsible for process compliance to now being actively involved in strategic organizational governance. This technical paper charters the path of the SQA role within an organization commencing with explaining its traditional responsibilities and activities and culminates with what we believe would be the future focus of this extremely important role

Software reliability for business applications is becoming a topic of interest in the IT community. An effective method to validate and understand defect behaviour in a software application is Fault Injection. Fault injection involves the deliberate insertion of faults or errors into software in order to determine its response and to study its behaviour. Fault Injection Modeling has demonstrated to be an effective method for study and analysis of defect response, validating fault-tolerant systems, and understanding systems behaviour in the presence of injected faults. The objectives of this study are to measure and analyze defect leakage; Amplification Index (AI) of errors and examine “Domino” effect of defects leaked into subsequent Software Development Life Cycle phases in a business application. The approach endeavour to demonstrate the phasewise impact of leaked defects, through causal analysis and quantitative analysis of defects leakage and amplification index patterns in system built using technology variants (C#, VB 6.0, Java)