Using ISO 9126 with QoS DiffServ model for evaluating software quality in mobile environments

Evaluation of software quality in mobile environments is a subject of active research and is a difficult task. This is caused by dynamic characteristics of mobile networks and the limited resources of mobile devices. This paper presents a study to help quality managers and evaluators using the ISO 9126 software quality standard, with the DiffServ QoS model to evaluate product quality in mobile environments. The effects of mobile technologies limitations are analyzed for each QoS parameter and for each Diffserv class. As a result of this study, the reliability and the efficiency are the software product quality characteristics, the most correlated with Diffserv classes in terms of influence of the mobile environment limitations. It is caused by the fact that these characteristics are dependent on the software runtime environment and the Diffserv QoS model focuses on the quality at the network level, unlike the ISO 9126 standard that applies to the application level.