Article Preview
TopIntroduction
From the past few years, the focus is more on to enhance software development practices by improving reusability, understandability of requirements, software delivery time and cost-effectiveness and many other characteristics. Quality being the most important aspect either in discrete production process or continuous production process, needs to be focused more to deliver a product that is acceptable by customers. According to International Standard Organization ISO 9000, quality is defined as the totality of characteristics of a product as a whole to satisfy the stated and implied needs in accordance with its capability. Here the stated needs mean the requirements that are given by the customer at the time of an agreement, and the implied needs are the needs that are identified by the developers as the necessary needs to be included while developing the product. Definition of quality has been perceived differently by various persons, but the one that has been given by the customer is the definition that counts the most. Quality corresponds to standards, cost of the product, conformance to requirements and value for performance (Juran & Gryna, 2010; Weinberg, 1992).
Overall quality is the much more complicated term than it appears. There are varieties of perspectives for consideration, for example, customer’s perspective, developer’s perspective, tester’s perspective, specification based perspective, manufacturing based perspective, quality assurance based perspective and many more. In every single domain, quality is one of the most important factors for a product to survive in the market. Many more definitions are given by different researchers from the perspective of manufacturing the product and engineering the product respectively. Definition of quality has a contextual bias towards these two industries. A general definition is possible for all the areas; however, when applying to IT software products the context is slightly different. Some of the authors named as Meyer (2000), Pressman (2011), and Sommerville (2015) states' software quality differently but from the same perspective towards software product. The quality of the development process significantly affects the value received by customers and development teams. Hence, for high quality product it’s important to concentrate more on development process as development of good quality software is usually an organizational effort, “something of higher quality has more value than of low quality”.