Systems and software engineering. Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE). Quality measure elements

Abstract

The purpose of this International Standard is to define and/or design an initial set of Quality Measure Elements (QME) to be used throughout the product life cycle for the purpose of Systems and Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE). The document also gives a set of rules to design a QME or verify the design of an existing QME. The content of this document constitutes the link between the ISO/IEC 9126 series of standards and the subsequent SQuaRE series of standards.

A number of QMEs for quality measures that quantify some of the characteristic and subcharacteristic represent an initial list, which is to be used during the construction of the quality measures as referenced in ISO/IEC TR 9126-2, ISO/IEC TR 9126-3 and ISO/IEC TR 9126-4. Quality measures presented in the SQuaRE series (Figures 1, 2) were extracted from ISO/IEC TR 9126 series but it is not the only source. When evaluating selected quality measures, the user should first understand the definition of each property related to a QME used within the selected quality measures.

The main purposes of defining and using the Quality Measures Elements (QMEs) in this document are:

• To provide guidance for organisations developing and implementing their own QMEs;
• To promote the consistent use of specific QME for measuring and using the product properties that are relevant to different product quality characteristics and subcharacteristics;
• To help identify a set of QMEs that are uniquely required to derive all the quality measures for a given set of characteristics or a set of subcharacteristics of a product.

The QMEs are the common components of a number of quality measures. The intended usage of this International standard is that users will be able to select and define relevant valid QMEs to define internal, external, data or quality-in-use quality measures. Then, these can be used for quality requirements definition, products evaluation and quality assessment but not necessary limited to those. It is therefore recommended to use this document prior or together with the ISO/IEC 2502n series of standards.

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Scope

ISO/IEC 25021:2012 provides guides to specify Quality Measure Elements (QME) and initial set of QME as examples. QME is a measure defined in terms of a property and the measurement method for quantifying it, including optionally the transformation by a mathematical function.
ISO/IEC 25021:2012 is intended to be used throughout the system and software product life cycle used with other documents of the ISO/IEC 250nn SQuaRE series, especially ISO/IEC 25022, ISO/IEC 25023 and ISO/IEC 25024.
© British Standards Institution 2023

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