Software Quality - Definition

Definition

Even though (as noted in the article on quality in business) "quality is a perceptual, conditional and somewhat subjective attribute and may be understood differently by different people," software structural quality characteristics have been clearly defined by the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ). Under the guidance of Bill Curtis, co-author of the Capability Maturity Model framework and CISQ's first Director; and Capers Jones, CISQ's Distinguished Advisor, CISQ has defined 5 major desirable characteristics of a piece of software needed to provide business value. In the House of Quality model, these are "Whats" that need to be achieved:

• Reliability: An attribute of resiliency and structural solidity. Reliability measures the level of risk and the likelihood of potential application failures. It also measures the defects injected due to modifications made to the software (its “stability” as termed by ISO). The goal for checking and monitoring Reliability is to reduce and prevent application downtime, application outages and errors that directly affect users, and enhance the image of IT and its impact on a company’s business performance.
• Efficiency: The source code and software architecture attributes are the elements that ensure high performance once the application is in run-time mode. Efficiency is especially important for applications in high execution speed environments such as algorithmic or transactional processing where performance and scalability are paramount. An analysis of source code efficiency and scalability provides a clear picture of the latent business risks and the harm they can cause to customer satisfaction due to response-time degradation.
• Security: A measure of the likelihood of potential security breaches due to poor coding practices and architecture. This quantifies the risk of encountering critical vulnerabilities that damage the business.
• Maintainability: Maintainability includes the notion of adaptability, portability and transferability (from one development team to another). Measuring and monitoring maintainability is a must for mission-critical applications where change is driven by tight time-to-market schedules and where it is important for IT to remain responsive to business-driven changes. It is also essential to keep maintenance costs under control.
• Size: While not a quality attribute per se, the sizing of source code is a software characteristic that obviously impacts maintainability. Combined with the above quality characteristics, software size can be used to assess the amount of work produced and to be done by teams, as well as their productivity through correlation with time-sheet data, and other SDLC-related metrics.

Software functional quality is defined as conformance to explicitly stated functional requirements, identified for example using Voice of the Customer analysis (part of the Design for Six Sigma toolkit and/or documented through use cases) and the level of satisfaction experienced by end-users. The latter is referred as to as usability and is concerned with how intuitive and responsive the user interface is, how easily simple and complex operations can be performed, and how useful error messages are. Typically, software testing practices and tools ensure that a piece of software behaves in compliance with the original design, planned user experience and desired testability, i.e. a piece of software's disposition to support acceptance criteria.

The dual structural/functional dimension of software quality is consistent with the model proposed in Steve McConnell's Code Complete which divides software characteristics into two pieces: internal and external quality characteristics. External quality characteristics are those parts of a product that face its users, where internal quality characteristics are those that do not.