Product Quality Evaluation Method (PQEM): A Comprehensive Approach for the Software Product Life Cycle

Abstract

Project managers, product owners, and quality assurance leaders need to visualize and understand the entire picture of the development process as well as comprehend the product quality level, in a synthetic and intuitive way in order to facilitate the decision of accepting or rejecting each iteration within the software life cycle. This idea is extremely important nowadays, due to the fact that time is a key resource and it should be managed wisely to obtain a feasible quality level for each software deliverable. This article presents a novel solution called Product Quality Evaluation Method (PQEM) to evaluate a set of quality characteristics for each iteration of a software product. PQEM is based on the Goal-Question-Metric approach, the standard ISO/IEC 25010, and the extension made of testing coverage in order to obtain the quality coverage of each quality characteristic. The outcome of PQEM is a single value representing the quality per each iteration of a product, as an aggregated measure. Even though a value it is not the regular idea of measuring quality, we believe that it can be useful to use this value to understand easily the quality level of each iteration. An illustrative example of the method was carried out with a web and mobile application, within the healthcare environment.