How do Colombian software companies evaluate software product quality?

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Software developers confuse product quality with process quality, leading them to think they are measuring product quality when they are not. This is the main finding of this study of software developers in young small to medium companies in Colombia. Software product quality reflects two perspectives: conformance to specifications, and satisfying expectations when it is used under specified conditions. Measuring product quality still remains a problem for software development companies in relation to factors such as cost, effort, time and competitiveness. There are few studies that show the current state of software product quality in companies, how companies evaluate product quality, and which measures they use to develop and launch products that meet high-quality criteria. This research presents a study of software product quality in seven young software development companies in a developing country. The candidate used a qualitative research approach to understand, through their experiences and knowledge, how 20 employees—developers, testers, and project managers—and their companies evaluate software product quality, and which measures they apply in their companies. The results demonstrate that software process quality is better understood, and applied, by these software companies than software product quality. A greater difficulty is that most study participants ‘overlaid’ the idea of product quality with process quality, i.e. they talked about product quality as if it were process quality. This confusion leads them to think that they are measuring product quality when they are not. These findings have implications for companies that wish to increase competitiveness and productivity as they must develop a working knowledge of software product quality that is not confused with software process quality. It also has implications for educators, to ensure that the distinction between process and product quality is explicitly taught

Improving quality model construction through knowledge reuse

Software quality models provide a framework to measure and evaluate software quality of software systems. They are the basis upon which classify requirements and may be eventually used to guide the quantification of these requirements, especially non-functional requirements. Lots of approaches for building quality models have been proposed in the last decades, but still their reuse along different projects is a challenge. In this paper we present several types of knowledge repositories and reuse processes to bridge this gap. The approach implements the idea of software factory and uses some well-known standards and notations like ISO/IEC 25010 as quality standard and the i* framework to codify knowledge patterns. We will illustrate how this reusebased approach helps in obtaining composite quality models for systems that integrate several software components with an individual quality model each.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Kravhantering vid införande av Business Intelligence-system

I ett mer och mer konkurrensinriktat affärsklimat har intresset för Business Intelligence (BI) ökat under de senaste åren för att kunna göra mer informerade och bättre beslut. Vid utveckling och införande av informationssystem är kravhantering en viktig del med hög komplexitet där felaktigheter kan leda till bristande kvalitet i systemet. Inom informationssystem utgör analytiska informationssystem en betydande del som kräver specifika metoder i kravhanteringsarbetet. Men vilka faktorer är egentligen viktiga i kravhanteringsarbetet vid införande av BI-system? För att besvara denna fråga har vi genomfört en undersökning med åtta konsultföretag som arbetar med BI. Dessa intervjuer kompletterades med ett frågeformulär. Med utgångspunkt från detta konstruerade vi en bild av kravhanteringsprocessen som visade att den ofta är ostrukturerad och att sällan finns en uttalad process för det. Vår undersökning visade emellertid även att det finns tydliga likheter mellan företagen med dem tekniker som används och de aktiviteter som genomförs

Software quality modeling experiences at an oil company

The concept of "software quality" is often hard to capture for an organization. Quality models aim at making the concept more operational by refining the "quality" of software development products and processes into sub-concepts down to the level of concrete metrics and indicators. In practice, it is difficult for an organization to come up with a reliable quality model because quality depends on numerous organizational context factors, and the model as well as the metrics and indicators need to be tailored to the specifics of the organization. This paper presents experiences in developing custom-tailored quality models for an organization, exemplified by Ecopetrol, a Colombian oil and gas company. The general approach taken is illustrated and excerpts from the initial model are presented