Can Software Quality Be Measured?

With customer stakeholders complaining about the the quality of software being delivered, the challenge in front of delivery/project manager was to find a way in which software quality can be measured.

Before going into how can the software quality be measured, one needs to understand why at all the software quality need to be measured?

The need to measure software quality has arisen due to following:

• Customer:Customer stakeholders needed a ways and means to ensure that software delivered to them by partner vendors are of high quality.
• Software Service Providers: Stakeholders such as software developers needed to be governed on regular basis to ensure consistent & predictable delivery of high quality software. This is where metrics for software quality would help.
• Product Development: In absence of customer stakeholders who may get interested to assess code and coding practices, the chances of deviation from the fact of having robust software with great quality are very high. Thus, it makes much more sense for a product development unit to establish a set of software quality standards and have metrics to measure the quality from time-to-time.

Software Quality Key Characteristics

Following are key characteristics of software quality (ISO 25000) that can be measured:

• Functionality
• Reliability
• Efficiency
• Maintainability
• Usability
• Portability

Following diagram shows in detail, the sub characteristics of above mentioned characteristics of software quality:

Each of the sub characteristics can be measured using different techniques. In later blogs, we shall try and evaluate different techniques to measure the quality characteristics. I shall also define and describe the various different aspects of ISO 25000 series vis-a-vis software quality.