Trust in Quality

The SAS Quality Imperative describes the essential role of quality in the creation and delivery of our offerings, products, and services. It will provide you with a comprehensive picture of SAS’ quality culture and processes used to develop our products and offerings.

Focusing on people and relationships – making employees a top priority – leads to more productive, satisfied, and dedicated employees. To achieve that ideal, employees must be trusted, valued, and believe that they can make a difference. To support the creative process and balance work and family, SAS provides a flexible work environment that enables them to be the most productive.

From Corporate Services to Facilities to Safety and Security, SAS strives to provide the best possible work environment for nearly 14,000 employees on the SAS Cary campus and at regional offices throughout the world.

SAS is committed to complying with all applicable global data protection and privacy laws, both with respect to personal information about our employees and to personal information that is collected or received from customers. To prevent unauthorized access or disclosure, to maintain data accuracy, and to ensure appropriate and lawful use, SAS has put in place reasonable physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure such information.

SAS Cloud and Information Service (CIS) partners with SAS business units and customers to deliver global technologies and services that increase business value through trust and partnership. CIS is committed to service excellence and has established practices, including continuous service improvement, that provide a framework for measuring and improving performance.

This section highlights the key underpinnings of quality software development at SAS, including external and internal standards, reliability and accuracy in algorithms and artificial intelligence, and project team organization and oversight.

SAS technologies such as SAS® Viya®, SAS® 9.4 and solutions in focus areas such as Analytics Platform, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Customer Intelligence, Data Management, Fraud and Security Intelligence, Risk, and Retail enable users to achieve quality results.

The Research and Development Division of SAS drives software research, development, and production. This section provides an overview of information sources used for SAS R&D research and the steps in the development process.

In the planning phase of SAS’ software development cycle, product teams estimate tasks, determine resource needs, identify risks, and verify that the project team and management are committed to the plan. Product teams create roadmaps to capture longer-term plans, including the main themes of upcoming releases. Prioritized features, requirements, and updates are captured in a product backlog. This prioritized product backlog is continuously refined throughout the software life cycle.

Product development teams write code and tests based on R&D policies, standards and processes, and coding guidelines. Product development teams also write, update, and implement automatic and manual testing based on test plans and testing guidelines, as explained in more detail in the Testing section.

SAS R&D staff embrace both the challenges and benefits of measuring software quality throughout its life cycle. From development engineers applying continuous integration (CI) techniques to test engineers verifying and validating SAS products through continuous testing (CT), the effort to ensure that our software meets or exceeds customer expectations never ends.

Product sign-off occurs when planned new functionality has been implemented and tested; requested fixes have been implemented and tested; quality metrics meet release criteria; and due diligence has been completed. The R&D director, development manager, test manager, documentation writer, and Technical Support consultant conduct reviews according to due diligence guidelines, which list quality attributes and procedures that all software must meet before the software can be released.

SAS® Viya® applications are deployed as containerized applications, improving deployment efficiency and configuration flexibility. SAS®9 can be deployed either on premises or it can be hosted as a managed application.

According to Senior Vice President Annette Harris, SAS Technical Support's mission is to "help our customers make the best use of our software products through effective and responsive support, active advocacy, and a broad and flexible range of self-help resources." This section explains how SAS Technical Support accomplishes that mission.

Helping SAS customers connect with each other facilitates knowledge and information sharing, so SAS provides several communication avenues for connecting with the broader user community.