Software Product Quality Measurements Future Directions

Abstract

There is an ever increasing need to measure software product quality pro-actively and early in the software development life-cycle by developers, project managers, acquirers and evaluators.. Work is currently being carried out on a suite of standards for software product quality measurement, under the control of Working Group 6 (WG6) within ISO/IEC JTCl/SC7. Central to this work is the evolution of a framework for both internal and external metrics in order to measure the attributes of the six quality characteristics and their corresponding sub-characteristics as defined in ISOAEC 9 126-1. Measurement of software product quality is being addressed for the following characteristics: Functionality, Reliability, Usability, Efficiency, Maintainability and Portability: As a requirement, and a critical part of this work, there is a need to validate the measurements in terms of coverage, usage and validity, as well as the original intent of creating a basic core set. A resolution was accepted at the last WG6 meeting to present the framework and actual measurements to an independent panel of experts in the format of a workshop in order to gather external judgment and expertise.