CORNERING THE CHIMERA

Often over the past decade, the term ''software quality'' has been loo sely used in relation to process and product. This has created conside rable confusion and diverted the industry from its primary goal - impr oving the quality of the products of the various software-development phases. Little attention has been paid to the systematic study of tang ible product properties and their influence on high-level quality attr ibutes. Today the dominant modus operandi for software development is heavily process-oriented. This rests on the widely held belief that yo u need a quality process to produce a quality product. The flaw in thi s approach is that the emphasis on process usually comes at the expens e of constructing, refining, and using adequate product quality models . The fundamental axiom of software product quality is: a product's ta ngible internal characteristics or properties determine its external q uality attributes. Developers must build these internal properties int o a product in order for it to exhibit the desired external quality at tributes. a product quality model, therefore, must comprehensively ide ntify the tangible internal product characteristics that have the most significant effect on external quality attributes. I suggest a framew ork for the construction and use of practical, testable quality models for requirements, design, and implementation. Such information may be used directly to build, compare, and assess better quality software p roducts.