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quality assurance software quality software measurement and evaluation quality metrics quality characteristics management by objectives software standards software reliability testing The study reported in this article establishes a conceptual framework and some key initial results in the analysis of the characteristics of software quality. Its main results and conclusions are: Explicit attention to characteristics of software quality can lead to significant savings in software life-cycle costs. The current software state of the art imposes specific limitations on our ability to automatically and quantitatively evaluate the quality of software. A definitive hierarchy of well-defined, well-differentiated characteristics of software quality is developed. Its higher-level structure reflects the actual uses to which software quality evaluation would be put; its lower-level characteristics are closely correlated with actual software metric evaluations that can be performed. A large number of software-quality-evaluation metrics have been defined, classified, and evaluated with respect to their potential benefits, quantifiability, and ease of automation. Particular software life-cycle activities have been identified that have significant leverage on software quality. Most importantly, we believe that the study reported in this paper provides for the first time a clear, well-defined framework for assessing the often slippery issuesassociated with software quality, via the consistent and mutually supportive sets of definitions, distinctions, guidelines, and experiences cited. This framework is certainly not complete, but it has been brought to a point sufficient to serve as a viable basis for future refinements and extensions. I.
Boehm et al. (Wed,) studied this question.