Certification, that is, the assessment by an independent entity accredited to carry out audits, is an area that has not been contemplated by the ISO/IEC 25000 series of standards until now. Nevertheless, software product certification is of great interest to developers and/or purchasers of software products, since it allows for identifying the quality of a software product in a quick and standardized way. For that reason, in recent years AENOR (Spanish Association for Standardisation and Certification) and the software product quality evaluation laboratory AQC Lab have been working on a certification scheme based on the ISO/IEC 25000 series of standards, which has already yielded results with the evaluation of the maintainability and the functional suitability of several products.
In order to support this process of evaluation, improvement and certification of the software product, a Software Product Quality Evaluation and Certification Ecosystem is being built, which identifies all the entities involved in the process for obtaining a software product quality certificate. The Ecosystem consists of the following entities: