Towards Understanding Industry's Perspectives on the Software Quality Characteristics: A Survey

The ISO SQuaRE software quality standard categorises software quality into eight different characteristics: functional suitability, performance efficiency, compatibility, usability, reliability, security, maintainability and portability. Each quality characteristic is further considered in terms of a cohesive set of sub-characteristics. In this paper, a survey has been conducted with the goal of understanding which software quality characteristics are popular in industries and any modeling languages and tools used for analysing the software quality. The survey has been performed with 16 experienced practitioners, who work for a Turkish software company and have been requested to answer a pre-determined set of questions. The survey results lead to many interesting outcomes, some of which are as follows: (i) maintainability and performance efficiency are the top-popular characteristics, while portability is the least, (ii) time behaviour is the top-considered performance sub-characteristic, (iii) interoperability is the top-considered compatibility sub-characteristic, (iv) learnability and appropriateness recognisability are the top-considered usability sub-characteristics, (v) availability is the top-considered reliability sub-characteristic, (vi) confidentiality and integrity are the top-considered security sub-characteristics, (vii) modularity and reusability are the top-considered maintainability sub-characteristics, (viii) none of the participants use any modeling languages for analysing the software quality early on, and (ix) the participants use COTS tools for analysing the software implementation.