Defining software quality characteristics to facilitate software quality control and software process improvement

Abstract This chapter examines the structure and purpose of three pioneering and popular software quality characterization models (McCall, Boehm and ISO 9126), in order to assist software professionals in quantitatively specifying and measuring software attributes for software quality control and ongoing process improvement. The three software quality characterization models are analyzed in order to identify and understand the nature of structures that are able to define desired quality factors and associate them with the ways and means of incorporating and measuring them in a software product. Following analysis of the purpose and schematics of these popular models, a generic approach to utilizing software quality characterization models for software quality control and software process improvement is presented.