A SQuaRE-based software quality evaluation framework and its case study

Software stakeholders, including developers, managers, and end users, require high quality software products. Several works have aimed to identify software quality, but the quality of software products is often not comprehensively, specifically, or effectively defined because previous approaches have focused on certain quality aspects. Moreover, the evaluation results of quality metrics often depend on software stakeholders so that it is often hard to compare quality evaluation results across software products. ISO/IEC has tried to define evaluation methods for the quality of software products and provide common standards, called the SQuaRE (Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation) series including ISO/IEC 25022:2016 and ISO/IEC 25023:2016. However, the SQuaRE series include ambiguous metrics so that it is not always easy to apply the series to products and compare results. In this paper, we propose a SQuaRE-based software quality evaluation framework, which successfully concretized many product metrics and quality in use metrics originally defined in the SQuaRE series 1 . Through a case study targeting a commercial software product, we confirmed that our framework is concretely applicable to the software package/service product.