Software Development

Information technology in recent times has become significant in operation of major industries and now represents a rapidly growing market of strategic importance. The successful functioning of software products is critical because nearly all the sectors depend on them. Quality of software becomes one of the aspects of software engineering that cannot be overlooked. The single most important cause for software development project failure is the inability of the developer to understand customer needs. Software developers often fail to develop good quality programs because they do not know the characteristics of a program that will conform to all standards as per business requirement.

Software quality is defines as :

Conformance to explicitly stated functional and performance requirements, explicitly documented development standards, and implicit characteristics that are expected of all professionally developed software.

Software quality can also be defined as :

.Software requirement

.Development standards that define a set of criteria that must be followed at the time of construction.

Quality Factors

There are a number of factors that affect the quality of software. These factors are complex mix of conditions that can be measured based in certain criteria. They can be either measured directly or indirectly.

Software quality factors based on three most important aspects of a software product. These aspects are product operations, product revision and product transition.

The product operations factors that determine the quality of software when a program is executed are as follows:

• Correctness : Correctness determines to what extent the program fulfills the specifications. It corresponds to the functionality that is determined by calculating the capability of the program in terms of accuracy of the program. It also analyses how the program affects the security of the system.

• Reliability : Reliability is evaluated by measuring the frequency of failure as well as the severity of the error. It also determines the correctness of the program, ability to recover from a failure and time between failure and recovery. A functionally correct system loaded with erroneous data can result in system failure.

• Efficiency : Efficiency includes the amount of resources that are required for the program to run. It is captured in terms of performance of the program, the ability of a system to perform certain tasks with in a time frame required by the user, with maximum efficiency. It is calculated by assessing processing speed, response time, resource consumption, throughput and efficiency. For a high performance, the system must make very efficient use of the resources such as processor, main memory, swap memory, disk space etc.

• Integrity : Integrity measures to what extent unauthorized access to the software can be prevented or in other words determines whether or not the software takes care of security.

• Usability : Usability specifies the efforts required to learn, operate and prepare input and output of a program. It is calculated by taking into account the human factors along with elegance, uniformity and documentation. The tasks should not be performed clumsily.

These factors need to be taken into consideration, to develop dependable system. It is very important that the product provides safe and secure services. Good quality software stresses on the fact that the product is not only correct and reliable but also ensures the system functionality is defined such that it delivers correct performance in all circumstances.