Evaluation Approaches

Quality is a desirable characteristic for all products in all fields of commerce. However, while consumers and suppliers are instinctively capable of detecting the presence or absence of quality for the vast majority of products (e.g. food, clothing, TV programmes, etc.), software still seems difficult to evaluate.

However, with software increasingly becoming a common component of modern society, the need to effectively measure its quality is now more compelling than ever. This is where software product evaluation methods and techniques come into play. Modern methods for software product evaluation provide ways to represent, define, and evaluate software quality in a repeatable and consistent fashion, often with the help of guidelines from International Standards such as ISO/IEC 9126 and the proposed ISO/IEC 14598 (Draft).

The services related to software product evaluation are usually tailored to the needs of individual end users or suppliers, depending on why the evaluation was requested. In the experience of the authors, software evaluation services include: