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The ISO/IEC 9126 Quality Standard

The ISO/IEC 9126 quality standard defines a set of standards related to software quality, including ISO 9000-3 for quality assurance processes and ISO/IEC 9126 for evaluating software product quality. ISO/IEC 9126 specifically addresses defining quality models and is chosen as the framework. It defines a multilevel hierarchy of quality characteristics, subcharacteristics, and attributes. The standard distinguishes between internal quality measured during development and external quality measured during testing.

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238 views2 pages

The ISO/IEC 9126 Quality Standard

The ISO/IEC 9126 quality standard defines a set of standards related to software quality, including ISO 9000-3 for quality assurance processes and ISO/IEC 9126 for evaluating software product quality. ISO/IEC 9126 specifically addresses defining quality models and is chosen as the framework. It defines a multilevel hierarchy of quality characteristics, subcharacteristics, and attributes. The standard distinguishes between internal quality measured during development and external quality measured during testing.

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sujitha14
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The ISO/IEC 9126 quality standard


The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has defined a set of ISO and ISO/IEC standards related to software quality. First of all, it's worth to mention the ISO 9000- 3 guidelines for applying the ISO 9001 standard concerned with quality assurance processes to the development, supply, installation and maintenance of computer software. Then, the standard ISO/IEC 9126 [5] for software product quality, which has to be used in conjunction with the ISO/IEC 14598 for the evaluation of software products. Other standards related to or that can be used in conjunction with ISO/IEC 9126 and ISO/IEC 14598, are: ISO/IEC 12119 - Quality requirements for software packages ISO/IEC 12207 - Software life cycle processes ISO/IEC 14143 - Software measurement ISO/IEC 15271 - Guide for ISO/IEC 12207 ISO/IEC 15504 - Software process assessment (also known as Spice) ISO/IEC 15939 - Software measurement process ISO/IEC 9126-1 specifically addresses the definition of quality models and thus it is chosen as our framework in this paper. The main idea behind this standard is the definition of a quality model and its use as a framework for software evaluation. An ISO/IEC 9126-1 quality model is defined by means of general characteristics of software, which are further refined into subcharacteristics, which in turn are decomposed into attributes, yielding to a multilevel hierarchy; intermediate hierarchies of subcharacteristics and attributes may appear. At the bottom of the hierarchy appear the measurable software attributes, whose values are computed by using some metric. Throughout the paper, we refer to characteristics, subcharacteristics and attributes as quality factors. Quality requirements may be defined as restrictions over the quality model. The 2001 version of the standard introduces the subcharacteristics as normative, based on the informative subcharacteristics introduced in the 1991 version. The ISO/IEC 9126 standard makes a distinction between internal quality and external quality, and introduces the so-called quality in use. These models categorise software quality attributes into characteristics. The attributes that can be measured during the development process are referred to as internal. The external behaviour can be measured during the testing process, and finally the user's view of quality is shown measuring the quality-in-use attributes. Examples of the metrics for external, internal and quality-in-use attributes can be found respectively in parts 2, 3 and 4 of the standard (this last part not yet published). The quality model introduced in the standard is common for external and internal quality aspects (although of course they will be refined in different ways), whilst another model for quality in use is introduced. Table 1 enumerates the six quality characteristics defined in the ISO/IEC 9126-1 internal/external quality model and their decomposition into subcharacteristics. This quality model is chosen as framework in this paper. Just to mention, the quality model for quality in use is

categorised into four characteristics: effectiveness, productivity, safety and satisfaction. Table 1: the ISO/IEC 9126-1 internal/external quality model
Characteristics Subcharacteristcs

we propose to use a unified framework for describing technical and non-technical factors. We focus on the case of using quality models for describing technical factors, therefore we propose to enlarge quality models to accommodate non-technical factors in a uniform way. We have chosen the ISO/IEC 9126 quality standard, although the main ideas of our proposal could be used for other quality frameworks.

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