Analysis of the ISBSG software repository from the ISO 9126 view of software product quality

The data repository of the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) can be used by researchers to investigate cause and effect relationships by enabling them to study which variables contribute to achieving certain objectives, such as increasing productivity and improving quality. The ISO 9126 series proposes a number of software quality models, and a large inventory of candidate derived measures for those models. However, even if in the 25000 series (an upcoming version of ISO 9126) there is a plan to better define the base and derived measures, neither the ISO 9126 nor ISO 25000 series include a data repository or intend to create one, and without data for comparison purposes or for analyzing actual relationships across quality attributes and models, the series is challenging to use in practice. This paper concurrently analyzes ISO 9126 and the ISBSG data repository on software projects in order to identify the subset of ISO 9126 quality characteristics that is referenced in the ISBSG repository. It also identifies a number of quality-related data fields from the ISBSG which can be useful in empirical and benchmarking studies.