Welcome to Software Quality
Software quality may refer: to desirable characteristics of software products, to the extent to which a particular software product possess those characteristics, and to processes, tools, and techniques used to achieve those characteristics. Over the years, authors and organizations have defined the term quality differently. To Phil Crosby, it was “conformance to requirements”. Watts Humphrey refers to it as “achieving excellent levels of “fitness for use”. Meanwhile, IBM coined the phrase “market-driven quality,” where the “customer is the final arbiter”.
More recently, software quality is defined as the “capability of software product to satisfy stated and implied needs under specified conditions” and as “the degree to which a software product meets established requirements; however, quality depends upon the degree to which those established requirements accurately represent stakeholder needs, wants, and expectations”. Both definitions embrace the premise of conformance to requirements. Neither refers to types of requirements (e.g., functional, reliability, performance, dependability, or any other characteristic). Significantly, however, these definitions emphasize that quality is dependent upon requirements.
These definitions also illustrate another reason for the prevalence of software quality: a frequent ambiguity of software quality versus software quality requirements (“the -ilities” is a common shorthand). Software quality requirements are actually attributes of (or constraints on) functional requirements (what the system does). Software requirements may also specify resource usage, a communication protocol, or many other characteristics.Software quality is achieved by conformance to all requirements regardless of what characteristic is specified or how requirements are grouped or named.
Source: Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK)
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