Software Quality Engineering: The Leverage for Gaining Maturity

Abstract

For users, a software product frequently corresponds to a black box that must effectively support their business processes. Consequently, what a stakeholder seeks is a software product that possesses both required functionality and required quality. Young, immature companies usually can only afford developing functionalities, while mature organizations can develop quality, as well. In this sense, the level of quality observed in a software product is an indicator of the level of maturity of its developer. One may even say that because functionalities are always in a product and quality only sometimes, quality is a more restrictive indicator. Having this in mind, in this chapter we present software quality engineering from both implementation and managerial perspectives, discuss aspects of functionality-quality conflict in the economic and business dimensions, and finally give a few practical observations and recommendations that might find merit in the real, software development lifecycle.