Software Quality

In the context of software engineering, software quality refers to two related but distinct notions that exist wherever quality is defined in a business context:

• Software functional quality reflects how well it complies with or conforms to a given design, based on functional requirements or specifications. That attribute can also be described as the fitness for purpose of a piece of software or how it compares to competitors in the marketplace as a worthwhile product;
• Software structural quality refers to how it meets non-functional requirements that support the delivery of the functional requirements, such as robustness or maintainability, the degree to which the software was produced correctly.

Structural quality is evaluated through the analysis of the software inner structure, its source code, in effect how its architecture adheres to sound principles of software architecture. In contrast, functional quality is typically enforced and measured through software testing.

Historically, the structure, classification and terminology of attributes and metrics applicable to software quality management have been derived or extracted from the ISO 9126-3 and the subsequent ISO 25000:2005 quality model, also known as SQuaRE. Based on these models, the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) has defined 5 major desirable structural characteristics needed for a piece of software to provide business value: Reliability, Efficiency, Security, Maintainability and (adequate) Size.

Software quality measurement quantifies to what extent a software or system rates along each of these five dimensions. An aggregated measure of software quality can be computed through a qualitative or a quantitative scoring scheme or a mix of both and then a weighting system reflecting the priorities. This view of software quality being positioned on a linear continuum is supplemented by the analysis of "critical programming errors" that under specific circumstances can lead to catastrophic outages or performance degradations that make a given system unsuitable for use regardless of rating based on aggregated measurements.