The use and usefulness of the ISO/IEC 9126 quality standard

Author

Al-Kilidar, Hiyam ; Cox, Karl ; Kitchenham, Barbara

Author_Institution

Sch. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., New South Wales Univ., Sydney, NSW, Australia

fYear

2005

fDate

17-18 Nov. 2005

Abstract

This paper reports an evaluation the utility of ISO/IEC 9126. ISO/IEC 9126 is an international standard intended to ensure the quality of all software-intensive products including safety-critical systems where lives are at risk if software components fail. Our evaluation exercise arose from an experiment that required a quality assessment of outputs of the design process. Although ISO/IEC 9126 is intended to support evaluation of intermediate software products, both the experimental subjects (158 final year computer science and engineering student) and experimenters found the standard was ambiguous in meaning, incomplete with respect to quality characteristics and overlapping with respect to measured properties. We conclude that ISO/IEC 9126 is not suitable for measuring design quality of software products. This casts serious doubts as to the validity of the standard as a whole.

Keywords

IEC standards; ISO standards; safety-critical software; software quality; software standards; IEC 9126 quality standard; ISO 9126 quality standard; quality assessment; safety-critical system; software quality; software-intensive product; Computer science; Engineering students; IEC standards; ISO standards; Process design; Quality assessment; Software measurement; Software quality; Software safety; Software standards;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Empirical Software Engineering, 2005. 2005 International Symposium on

Print_ISBN

0-7803-9507-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISESE.2005.1541821

Filename

1541821