Product evaluation

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.

Notwithstanding the above, there are many reasons why an organization may be interested in implementing a product quality control system based on the ISO/IEC 25000 series of standards. Among the most important would be:

• Differentiating from competitors, meeting delivery deadlines and assuring that product defects are reduced.
• Being able to establish service level agreements, defining specific quality parameters that the product must meet before being delivered.
• Detecting defects in the software product and proceed to their removal before its delivery, saving costs in the subsequent maintenance phase.
• Evaluating and monitoring the performance of the software product being developed, ensuring that it provides results given the existing time and resource constraints.
• Ensuring that the software product being developed meets the required levels for security features (confidentiality , integrity, authenticity , non-repudiation , etc.).
• Checking that the product being developed can be deployed in the production environment without compromising other systems and maintaining compatibility with the necessary interfaces.

The following figure highlights the benefits that software quality evaluation provides to two kind of organizations; companies that develop software and organizations that acquire software: