Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Software quality
Summary
In the context of software engineering, software quality refers to two related but distinct notions:
Software's functional quality reflects how well it complies with or conforms to a given design, based on functional requirements or specifications. That attribute can also be described as the fitness for purpose of a piece of software or how it compares to competitors in the marketplace as a worthwhile product. It is the degree to which the correct software was produced.
Software structural quality refers to how it meets non-functional requirements that support the delivery of the functional requirements, such as robustness or maintainability. It has a lot more to do with the degree to which the software works as needed.
Many aspects of structural quality can be evaluated only statically through the analysis of the software inner structure, its source code (see Software metrics), at the unit level, and at the system level (sometimes referred to as end-to-end testing), which is in effect how its architecture adheres to sound principles of software architecture outlined in a paper on the topic by Object Management Group (OMG).
However some structural qualities, such as usability, can be assessed only dynamically (users or others acting on their behalf interact with the software or, at least, some prototype or partial implementation; even the interaction with a mock version made in cardboard represents a dynamic test because such version can be considered a prototype). Other aspects, such as reliability, might involve not only the software but also the underlying hardware, therefore, it can be assessed both statically and dynamically (stress test).
Functional quality is typically assessed dynamically but it is also possible to use static tests (such as software reviews).
Historically, the structure, classification and terminology of attributes and metrics applicable to software quality management have been derived or extracted from the ISO 9126 and the subsequent ISO/IEC 25000 standard.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.