Expected software quality profile: A methodology and a case study

For decades, the notion of software quality evaluation is raised as a challenging task. Recently many studies have presented quality evaluation methodologies for specific domains or specific techniques. They usually select a pre-defined model, customize the characteristics, define the metrics and evaluate the quality of the product or development process. Our study presents a bottom-up methodology for the quality evaluation process. In this paper, we present a methodology to create the expected quality profile. In our approach, the first step is listening to the users, and then retrieving the most important quality factors and creating a model to evaluate the expected quality of the software product. The profile is formed by eliciting the expected users' quality expectations, and then quantifying the elicited factors by applying them to our quality evaluation model and the ISO/IEC 25000 standard. The result of this research empowers the software development stakeholders to perform a crosscheck between users' specific quality expectations and other drivers (functional and architecture/design requirements), before or during the software development process. The crosscheck aims to guarantee that there are enough activities, roles and artifacts in the software development process to support the users' quality requirements.