Artifact: Quality Assurance Plan

Quality Assurance Plan	The Quality Assurance Plan is an artifact that provides a clear view of how product, artifact, and process quality are to be assured. It contains the Review and Audit Plan, and references a number of other artifacts developed during the Inception phase. It is maintained throughout the project.
Role:	Quality/Process Manager
Templates:	HTML
Purpose Timing Responsibility Tailoring

Input to Activities:

Define Assessment and Traceability Needs

Compile Software Development Plan

Agree Mission

Assess and Advocate Quality

Identify Test Motivators

Assess and Improve Test Effort

Output from Activities:

Develop Quality Assurance Plan

Purpose

The purpose of the Quality Assurance Plan is to provide a single point of reference on the topic of quality for the project. It is a process-oriented artifact and highlights those elements of the RUP that are the contributors to achievement of quality objectives. The Quality Assurance Plan will not contain details of the techniques, criteria, metrics, and so on, of the peer reviews and evaluations whose focus is product. It requires, as a matter of compliance with the RUP, the details of product quality evaluation to be provided in the Evaluation Plan section of the Software Development Plan, and in the Test Plan.

Timing

This artifact is developed during the Inception phase and is updated at each major milestone.

Responsibility

The Quality/Process Manager is responsible for ensuring the Quality Assurance Plan is created, appropriate, and acceptable for the project.

Tailoring

The Quality Assurance Plan contains information that may be covered to a greater or lesser extent by other plans. The following approaches can be used to handle this potential overlap:

The following is a mapping of Quality Assurance Plan sections to artifacts that may contain complementary information:

Quality Assurance Plan Section	Complementary Artifact
Definitions, Acronyms, and Abbreviations	Glossary
Management	Software Development Plan
Documentation	Development Case
Standards and Guidelines	Development Case
Metrics	Development Case, Measurement Plan
Review and Audit Plan	Development Case, Configuration Management Plan
Evaluation and Test	Development Case, Software Development Plan (Evaluation Plan), Test Plan
Tools, Techniques and Methodologies	Development Case, Software Development Plan (Methods, Tools and Techniques)
Configuration Management	Configuration Management Plan
Supplier and Subcontractor Controls	Software Development Plan (Subcontractor Management Plan, Infrastructure Plan)
Quality Records	Configuration Management Plan
Training	Software Development Plan

Some projects may choose not to produce a Quality Assurance Plan and may cover any necessary information in these other plans.