What Are The Expectations For High-Quality Software?

From the abstract point of view, quality is hard to define or describe in terms. It is commonly associated with some impalpable qualities that satisfy users.

From the user’s point of view, quality means aptitude for goal or meeting user’s requirements.

From the manufacturing point of view, quality is compliance to process standards.

From the product standpoint, the focus is on peculiar qualities in the product itself hoping that controlling these internal quality pointers will result in improved external product behavior.

From the value-based viewpoint, quality is the clients’ readiness and desire to pay for a software product.

Roles and obligations

When software quality is concerned, different people would have different opinions and anticipations about their roles and obligations.

So focusing on quality assurance and quality engineering people can be divided into two broad groups:

Buyers of software products or services, including clients and users (internally or externally). In some cases it also can be made the differentiation between the clients, who are responsible for the purchase of software products or services, and the users, which use the software products or services for different goals.

Producers of software, and anyone related to the development cycle, management, marketing, maintenance and software products service. We accept a broad definition of producers, which also include third-party participants who may be involved in add-on products and services, software certification, software packaging, fulfilling independent verification and validation responsibilities, and so on.

Quality anticipations on the consumer side

It is understandably that the principal quality anticipations of a user are that a software system conducts helpful functions.

There are two main components to this expectation:

 

• It conducts correct functions as clarified, which, hopefully fits the user’s needs.

 

• It conducts these clarified functions accurately over repeated use or over a long period of time, or conducts its functions trustworthy.

These two components are related to the validation and verification points of quality assurance.

For lots of users of modern software and systems, ease of use, or usability, may be a more important quality expectation than reliability or other concerns.

Nevertheless, different users of the same system may have dissimilar opinions and priorities, such as the significance of usability for novice users and the significance of reliability for sophisticated users of the web.

The common quality anticipations of a client are parallel to the users’ one, with the supplementary concern for the price of the software or service. This supplementary concern can be represented by the value-based view of quality, that is, whether a client is ready to pay money for it.