Quality Assurance and Documentation Related to Architectures

In this chapter, we regard the connections of architectures to quality assurance and to documentation. Both are different, but the relations to architectures share some similarities. The study can be extended to all technical working areas (RE, AR, PS) and accompanying working areas (QA, DOC and PO). We restrict the discussion here mainly to architectures, according to the title of this book. First we make clear what we understand by quality assurance and by documentation. This is especially necessary for the term documentation, for which different definitions exist. Different examples for documentation and quality assurance are given, in order to get an overview of how they are related to architectures on one side and on the other, what typical situations between documents, their increments, and subconfigurations exist. The detected similarities give arguments why both are discussed here. Thus, this chapter is not about documentation and quality assurance in general. It concentrates on architectures and there on the parts of the overall configuration corresponding to documentation and quality assurance.