Software quality attributes

I got the following e-mail from a student after discussing definitions and frameworks of quality attributes:

Hello,

It seems there are 2 main groups of ISO standards dealing with software quality:

1. a 4 part ISO 9126 standard (QA considered are reliability, usability, efficiency, maintainability, portability AND, actually, functionality)
2. second generation of ISO software quality standards referred to as SQuaRE (Software product Quality Requirements and Evaluation): ISO/IEC 25000:2005, ISO/IEC TR 25021:2007 and ISO/IEC TR 25060:2010.

I couldn't find any free copies of these standards, so we can't really use them.

Anyway, it would be interesting to get during the lectures some additional information about different quality attributes models out there (early McCall and Boehm models, FURPS, ISO models etc.).

I replied with this:

You are correct. You can't access the ISO standards (without paying).

• For a very soft introduction to quality attributes, read this: http://www.stellman-greene.com/2009/10/03/using-nonfunctional-requirements/
• An in-depth analysis of a few quality attributes are available at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/95tr021.cfm
• For a definition of terminology I suggest IEEE std 610.12, bit this covers much(!) more than just quality attributes. It is available at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
• You can also read what the PhD students at Blekinge Technical University wrote down in a course about software quality: http://www.bth.se/tek/besq.nsf/pages/017bd879b7c9165dc12570680047aae2!OpenDocument
• And as usual, wikipedia is a good introduction, look at "software quality" or "FURPS" for example.

I think it will be a little too much to go into detail about different quality frameworks in this course, above they dedicated an entire course at PhD level to the subject.

Hope this helps,

Ulrik