Metrics and Models in Software Quality Engineering, Second Edition

Chapter 1. What Is Software Quality?

Quality must be defined and measured if improvement is to be achieved. Yet, a major problem in quality engineering and management is that the term quality is ambiguous, such that it is commonly misunderstood. The confusion may be attributed to several reasons. First, quality is not a single idea, but rather a multidimensional concept. The dimensions of quality include the entity of interest, the viewpoint on that entity, and the quality attributes of that entity. Second, for any concept there are levels of abstraction; when people talk about quality, one party could be referring to it in its broadest sense, whereas another might be referring to its specific meaning. Third, the term quality is a part of our ...