Users’ perspective in Software Quality - Part 2

4. User’s Perspective Quality Factors

Here, different characteristics of software product developed at software development companies are considered and checked; a number of such characteristics are taken into consideration by the end users. In it, the list of the software characteristics, considered by the end users and which affect their emotions are taken into consideration.

4.1 Functionality

The main idea of any software product is to perform specific business functionality. Thus, the performance of the software product is considered as crucial factor in the software quality, which identifies whether the software is really usable or not, by not considering the values of other software quality factors and functions. The critical role of the software presents whether the software product is apt, the result is correct, and whether some standard is followed in order to perform the required functions. The adaptability of the software presents how the system fit the developer’s requirements. Therefore, the suitability evaluates the ability of the software product to produce desired result and appropriate for a specified environment.

Software accuracy is defined as the ability of the software products to achieve its requirements, by bringing accurate output as per requirement of the system core developer. The software accuracy also affects the process continuity, system safety, total cost and maintainability. The compliance represents whether the system has followed any standard or certificates to achieve the user requirements.

4.2 Reliability

The reliability of the software represents the ability to perform the intended function properly without any failures. That is maintaining a level of services under specific condition within specific period of time during systems operation. Thus, the reliability measures the failures occurred in the software product within defined period of time.

Moreover, the reliability considered in the information and the system function safety harms that may be caused by the unauthorized people. Therefore, the reliability of the software product consists of several characteristics: the integrity, the maturity and the fault recovery.

4.3 Performance

Software performance is the most affected software characteristic, which gets affected by everything in the system product, from software characteristics to the system environment such as the operating system, the middleware, the hardware and the communication networks. System performance is a make-or break quality for software, which is an important nonfunctional attribute of software systems for producing quality software, that considers the run time property.

System performance is characterized by the amount of useful work accomplished by a system compared to the time and resources used. The performance factor is thus destined to evaluate whether the software application is running efficiently on the computing resources available or not.

The performance factor represents the degree of the system efficiency to produce desired result during system operation time. This degree is thus represented by combination of software and hardware attributes which influence on the time of answer and the range of the software services coverage.

4.4 Usability

As per the ACM the usability engineering (called human-computer interaction engineering) is defined as “a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and the study of major phenomena surrounding them”.

As per the software life cycle phases, usability characteristics were classified into three main categories: Interface characteristics, training, and operation supportability.

4.5 Transferability/Portability

Software transferability expresses the ability of the software to work properly in different type of platforms. It deals with the effort required to transfer a program from one hardware configuration and/or software system environment to another with slight modification. Thus this characteristic refers to how the software can be adopted to change its environment or with its requirements in software development companies.

Author: Shreyans Agrawal (ifour.shreyans.agrawal@gmail.com)

Users’ perspective in Software Quality - Part 1

1. Introduction

In the last decade, the cost of software products has reduced, which leads to growth in the software application development companies in India and software products are being used by individuals in addition to the corporations. Thus, research in software engineering increasingly grows and focuses on software quality evaluation and growth, yet most of all these research focuses on the internal/ development perspective.

Since the market of software development companies interest is on the user’s satisfaction with more attention to the perspective of users in software quality is needed, the software users from different education background and culture are considered in developing software products and services. Therefore, by not considering these factors, the software will be less used, which means the software product failed in the market.

According to ISO9126, the main consideration of the users is the software usability, its effects and its performance without knowing what is inside it, how it works, or how was it developed. 

Since, the software users do not care about all of software characteristics that are required to identify the quality of the software product, but it seems to be not accurate to show them the quality that they are searching for. Thus, the quality of the software as users need is very important in the market.

2. Software Quality Models

Since 1978, when McCall proposed first software quality model and also several other models were proposed to check the characteristics of the software products. These models combined the different point of views of the Manager, the Developer, and the user. Thus, there is no clear image of the software quality shows to the users. For e.g., if such a software product has a high maintainability and low usability might be equal to software has a high usability low maintainability.

3. User’s Emotion Quality Models

On the other side, the effect of the software products on the user were considered and several emotions models were proposed. The aim of these models is to evaluate the software product from what the users feels when they use it. It either proposed a B2C model that calculates the emotions of the end users instead of software characteristics. The cognitive emotions were adopted in this model. 

Author: Shreyans Agrawal (ifour.shreyans.agrawal@gmail.com)