Measuring the Software Product Quality during the Software Development Life-Cycle: An International Organization for Standardization Standards Perspective

Problem statement: The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published a set of international standards related to the software engineering, such as ISO 12207 and ISO 9126. However, there is a set of cross-references between these two standards. Approach: The ISO 9126 on software product quality and ISO 12207 on software life cycle processes had been analysed to investigate the relationships between them and to make a mapping from the ISO 9126 quality characteristics to the ISO 12207 activities and vers versa. Results: This study presented a set of comments and suggestions to improve the ISO 9126. Conclusion: The weaknesses of the cross-references between the two ISO standards had been highlighted. In addition, this study provided a number of comments and suggestions to be taken into account on the next version of the ISO 9126 international standard.