Preface

Achieving Software Product Quality
Erik van Veenendaal/Julie McMullan (eds.)

We are all becoming part of an information technology society. More and more organisations, in all sectors of the economy, are becoming increasingly dependent on software, either as an integral part of their "product" or to support their business process. Software is critical in providing a competitive edge to a great number of organisations and is increasingly becoming a key component in business systems, products and services. The quality of software products is now considered to be a critical business success factor.

The software industry has put considerable effort in trying to improve the quality of their products. The main focus has been on software process improvement. An indirect approach to achieve software product quality. In spite of interesting results there are still questions to be answered such as:

• How can quality be made explicit throughout the development process by developers and testers ?
• How can users and customers be convinced of the quality of a software product ?

This book addresses a number of important topics within the area of software product quality. The results of many international research projects are presented along with a great number of practical experiences and case studies. Together the various papers present a coherent overview on the state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice in the area of software product quality:

• A framework is presented to position software product quality in the overall software quality area. The latest developments on the ISO product quality standards, such as ISO 9126, are also discussed as part of this topic.
• Measurement is an essential part of any quality approach, "to measure is to know". The Goal Question Metric approach can be applied to measure and interpret the quality of software products.
• Usability is becoming more and more important. It is no longer sufficient to provide solutions which work but rather software must operate in an effective and satisfying manner. Approaches for designing usability, including case studies, are presented.
• Software Evaluation and Certification is rapidly growing towards maturity. A number of evaluation methods and techniques have been developed which can provide a greater understanding of the quality characteristics of software products. These methods also provide a foundation for subsequent certification.
• Testing often requires no less than 30 - 40% of the total effort. There is clearly a need to structure the testing process. TMap, a Test Management approach for structured testing is presented. Attention is also given to the latest challenge for the testing: the Year 2000.
• A relatively new phenomenon, related to the IT industry, is Multimedia. The last part of this book discusses problems and opportunities in the multimedia area and presents a direction towards multimedia systems quality.

Throughout this book the various topics are described by means of a number of papers. These have been written by experts in the field of software product quality and include contributions from partners of the ESSI-SCOPE project. The European project ESSI-SCOPE aims at raising the awareness on quality issues in software products, with a special focus on software product evaluation. A co-ordinated programme of activities is being organised across a number of European Union member states in which the experiences and knowledge of the partners is shared in a range of dissemination activities. The editors believe this book will provide a positive contribution towards the objectives of the ESSI-SCOPE project.

Finally, the editors wish to acknowledge all the contributors for their collaboration in producing this book on software product quality, despite the high demands of their on-going work. We very much enjoyed reading all the papers and hope you find that the information provided will help you in "achieving software product quality".

Erik van Veenendaal and Julie McMullan

Dublin, September 1997

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