Software Development Activity Cycles: Collaborative Development, Continuous Testing and User Acceptance

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022

R. F. RoseSoftware Development Activity Cycleshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-8239-7_9

9. Engineering Software Quality

Robert Rose¹  

(1)

Alexandria, VA, USA

 

Software Quality Defined

In the 1970s, when I first began designing and developing systems, the tribal knowledge at that time was that an information system should meet the following four criteria:

1. 1.

   Meets the needs of the user

    
2. 2.

   Be robust

    
3. 3.

   Be easy to use

    
4. 4.

   Be easy to maintain

    

Of course, those were the bad old days of punched cards, card sorters, mainframe computers, and IBM’s CICS (Customer Information Control System) as the most used (and still used) customer-facing application server. But the more ...