Quality software is reasonably bug or defect free, delivered on time and within budget, meets requirements and/or expectations, and is maintainable.

ISO 8402-1986 standard defines quality as  “the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bears its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.”

Key aspects of quality for the customer include:

• Good design – looks and style
• Good functionality – it does the job well
• Reliable – acceptable level of breakdowns or failure
• Consistency
• Durable – lasts as long as it should
• Good after sales service
• Value for money

Good design – looks and style:

It is very important to have a good design. The application or product should meet all the requirement specifications and at the same time it should be user friendly. The customers are basically attracted by the good looks and style of the application. The right color combinations, font size and the styling of the texts and buttons are very important.

Good functionality – it does the job well:

Along with the good looks of the application or the product it’s very important that the functionality should be intact. All the features and their functionality should work as expected. There should not be any deviation in the actual result and the expected result.

Reliable – acceptable level of breakdowns or failure:

After we have tested for all the features and their functionalities it also very important that the application or product should be reliable. For example: There is an application of saving the students records. This application should save all the students records and should not fail after entering 100 records. This is called reliability.

Consistency:

The software should have consistency across the application or product. Single software can be multi dimensional. It is very important that all the different dimensions should behave in a consistent manner.

Durable – lasts as long as it should:

The software should be durable. For example if software is being used for a year and the number of data has exceed 5000 records then it should not fail if number of records increases. The software product or application should continue to behave in the same way without any functional breaks.

Good after sales service:

Once the product is shipped to the customers then maintenance comes into the picture. It is very important to provide good sales services to keep the customers happy and satisfied. For example if after using the product for six months the customer realizes to make some changes to the application then those changes should be done as fast as possible and should be delivered to the customers on time with quality.

Value for money:

It’s always important to deliver the product to the customers which have value for money. The product should meet the requirement specifications. It should work as expected, should be user friendly. We should provide good services to the customers. Other than the features mentioned in the requirement specifications some additional functionality could be given to the customers which they might not have thought of. These additional functionalities should make their product more user friendly and easy to use. This also adds value for money.

Also see:

Why is testing necessary?

What is Software testing?

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