Software product quality: Ensuring a common goal

Abstract

Software qualities are in many cases tacit and hard to measure. Thus, there is a potential risk that they get lower priority than deadlines, cost and functionality. Yet software qualities impact customers, profits and even developer efficiency. This paper presents a method to evaluate the priority of software qualities in an industrial context. The method is applied in a case study, where the ISO 9126 model for software quality is combined with Theory-W to create a process for evaluating the alignment between success-critical stakeholder groups in the area of software product quality. The results of an exploratory case study using this tool is then presented and discussed. It is shown that the method provides valuable information about software qualities. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.