Every day, more and more organizations become interested in assuring and controlling the quality of their software products, and although each organization has characteristics that differentiate them from the rest, they can generally be classified into one of the following categories:

• Government agencies, whether at national, regional or local level, are increasingly outsourcing software development to external companies or software factories. Because of that, they need to have quality control measures that allows them to verify that the software they receive meets the minimum quality requirements, and also allows them to manage the service level agreements agreed upon with their suppliers properly.
• Software companies that outsource, either by nearshoring or by offshoring, part of their software development processes and, because of that, have to control the quality of the software they are supplied with.
• Factories and software development companies that are interested in having a mechanism that allows them to assure the quality of the software they develop.
• Factories and software development companies that are interested in assuring their clients of the quality of the products they are providing them by means of independent verification and validation.