Abstract

The quality of software has a profound impact on both the final costs for a company and general customer satisfaction. Organizations can expect big losses if software runs into issues or is delayed, let alone projects that fail. Ensuring that software meets a certain quality level requires standards to work against and use for improvement. The Spanish Association for Standardization and Certification (AENOR) in collaboration with Alarcos Quality Center (AQC) began a pilot project using the ISO/IEC 25000 set of standards to decide how well a piece of software will work. These standards define models and processes to assess the quality of software products, but they do not establish the necessary correlation with actual software quality. Using the ISO/IEC 25000 standards, then, SASC and AQC identified a series of “quality properties,” which when followed, better ensures that an organization makes informed decisions on their software products. These properties include, but are not limited to: coding rule violation, code documentation, the elimination of duplicate code, coupling or interdependence, and cohesion. To ensure compliance with these quality properties, AENOR developed a six step certification program to evaluate and accredit a software product. Organizations can then have high confidence in the quality of software products given the Certificate of Conformity from AENOR.