Software Product Quality Models, Developments, Trends, and Evaluation

Software product quality models have evolved in their abilities to capture and describe the abstract notion of software quality since the 1970s. Many models constructed deal with a specific part of software quality only which makes them ineligible to assess the quality of software products as a whole. Former publications failed to thoroughly examine and list all the available models which attempt to describe each known property of software product quality. This paper discovers such complete software product quality models published since 2000; moreover, it endeavours to measure the relevance of each model quantitatively by introducing indicators with regard to the scientific and industrial community. The identified 23 software product quality model classes differ significantly in terms of publication intensity, publication range, quality score average, relevance score and the 12-month average of the Google Relative Search Index. The results offer a foundation for selecting the appropriate software product quality model for use or for extension if newly identified quality properties need to be connected to a general context. Furthermore, the experiences accumulated on the field of software product quality modelling motivated researchers to successfully transfer the concepts to other areas where abstract entities need to be compared or assessed including the quality of higher educational teaching and business processes, which is also briefly highlighted in the paper.