Software quality revisited

Definitions of software quality have focused on software product quality factors. Quality that focuses on product quality is referred to by Kaoru Ishikawa as a narrow view of quality and he suggests that a broader more embracing and inclusive view is really necessary. The requirements of successful E-Commerce Web sites demonstrate this view. While the site might be considered as the product, Web site producers, owners and visitors also have a “quality” requirement. This broader view gives rises to the need to research and understand quality-of-development, quality-of-ownership, quality-of-engagement as well as quality-of-product. From the quality-of-product perspective, while many of the well established and understood software quality factors of McCall and Boehm still apply in this new domain, they need to be reinterpreted and they are no longer a complete set. Additional quality factors are needed for the WWW. Already identified are quality factors like visibility, intelligibility, credibility, engagibility and differentiation. In this new situation it is also necessary to take a step beyond MIS practice in order to achieve Web site quality and in this regard the paper further considers, proprietor development, engagibility, Software Quality - Metric Ratio Analysis (SQ-MRA) and progressive maintenance. Finally, having revisited software quality definitions and interpretations, it is appropriate to review original thinking regarding software quality factors in order to determine if lessons learned from this revisit apply to the quality of traditional Information Systems.