Updated July 5, 2023
Introduction to Quality Software
The software is developed by an engineer or developer, is required by the customer, and is used by various end-users. Thus, each has a different perception of the quality that decides whether the software is good. Customers may judge by cost. The developer may judge by user satisfaction, maintainability, efficiency, portability, and robustness. Users are feeling by reliability and usability.
Quality Factors
According to the ISO 9126 standard, there are six quality attributes which are as follows:
- Functionality is measured by the degree to which the software satisfies stated needs.
- Reliability: The reliability of software is checked by actively comparing the time the software is up and running.
- Usability: The usability of any software is measured by the degree to which software is easy to use.
- Efficiency: The efficiency of the software is measured by the degree to which the software makes optimum utilization of the resources.
Attributes of Good Quality Software
In 1977, Jim McCall produced McCall’s quality model for the US air force to bridge the gap between users and developers. He tried to map the user view with the developer’s priority.
He has categorized the software quality into three categories:
- Product Operations: The quality criteria specified in this category discusses how easy it should be to handle and how efficiently it should use the resources and give bug-free processing and expected outputs.
- Product Revision: The quality criteria specified in this category say that the software should be easy enough to test, maintain, and make any changes if required.
- Product Transition: The quality criteria specified in this category says that it must be accessible to transit the software on any platform, should be able to share its code with the other languages on the forum, and try to write the code, i.e., reusable in the future in any additional software development.
The attributes of quality software in the above categories are as below:
- Correctness: It means the required functionality and correct results. Customer satisfaction depends on the degree to which customer requirements and expectations have been met. It should provide all the functionality desired by the customer.
- Efficiency: It means the efficient use of resources. The software design and architecture should be such that it gives you a response in the least processing time, using the resources in the best possible way.
- Reliability: It means bug-free execution, i.e., assured performance, fully verified and validated processes, secured and safe to work when breaking down or power crisis. It should be reliable in all conditions.
- Integrity: Integrity is related to the extent of access to the software by unauthorized users that can be controlled.
- Usability: It means that the software must be user-friendly. The software should have hood documentation and a user manual, which may include the installation and the software’s process. This makes it easy for the new to learn and operate, says studying the manual.
- Testability: It should need less effort to test the program so that it performs its intended function. As the complexity of the program increase, the steps to test the software also increase.
- Portability means the software should be able to transfer the software from one environment to another.
- Reusability: It gives you the concept of writing once and uses it many times. For example, you are writing functions or sub-procedures to receive variable parameters. The calling code passes the value to the parameters, and the called procedure processes them as needed.
- Interoperability: The software development should be to interact with other products. For example, the word processor can interpolate charts from Excel or data from databases. It deals with the interface between software products over a communication network.
- Cost-effective: The software development within cost and budget depends on efficient design and high project management effort.
- Maintainability: For all the changes the customer or user desires, the developer has to respond fast. The difference could be to correct the mistake and expand its scope.
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This is a guide to Quality Software. Here we discuss the introduction and attributes of good quality software along with an explanation. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –
