SOFTWARE QUALITY

We examine the qualities that are pertinent to software products and software production processes. These qualities will become our goals in the practice of software engineering. 

The basic goal of software engineering is to produce quality software. Software quality is a broad and important field of software engineering addressed by several standardization bodies, such as ISO, IEEE, ANSI, etc. 

Software quality is the: 

Conformance to explicitly stated functional and performance requirements, explicitly documented development standards, and implicit characteristics that are expected of all professionally developed software. 

The above definition emphasizes three important points: 

1. Software requirements are the foundation from which quality is measured. Lack of conformance to requirements is lack of quality. 

2. Specified standards define a set of development criteria that guide the manner in which software is engineered. If the criteria are not followed, lack of quality will almost surely result. 

3. There is a set of implicit requirements that often goes unmentioned. If software conforms to its explicit requirements but fails to meet implicit requirements, software quality is suspect.

SOFTWARE QUALITY