ISBN : 978-81-963532-2-3 (E-Book) MODULE4 SOFTWAREQUALITY Traditionally, a quality product is defined in terms of its fitness of purpose. That is, a qualityproduct does exactly what the users want it to do. For software products, fitness of purpose isusually interpreted in terms of satisfaction of the requirements laid down in the SRS document.Although “fitness of purpose” is a satisfactory definition of quality for many products such as acar, a table fan, a grinding machine, etc. – for software products, “fitness of purpose” is not awholly satisfactory definition of quality. To give an example, consider a software product that isfunctionally correct. That is, it performs all functions as specified in the SRS document. But, hasanalmostunusableuserinterface.Eventhoughitmaybefunctionallycorrect,wecannotconsider it to be a quality product. Another example may be that of a product which doeseverything that the users want but has an almost incomprehensible and unmaintainable code.Therefore, the traditional concept of quality as “fitness of purpose” for software products is notwhollysatisfactory. The modern view of a quality associates with a software product several quality factors such asthefollowing: Portability: A software product is said to be portable, if it can be easily made to work indifferentoperatingsystemenvironments,indifferentmachines,withothersoftwareproducts, etc. Usability: A software product has good usability, if different categories of users (i.e. bothexpertand noviceusers)can easilyinvoke thefunctions of theproduct. Reusability: A software product has good reusability, if different modules of the productcan easilybereusedto develop newproducts. 126 Software Engineering Keerthana P, Manasa KN, Ganga D Bengal
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