Exploring the Perceived End-Product Quality in Software-Developing Organizations

Abstract

Software projects have four main objectives; produce required functionalities, with acceptable quality, in budget and in schedule. These objectives are all important for software projects to be successful, but how does the end-product quality fit to them? The objective of this study is to explore how organizations understand software quality and identify factors which seem to affect the quality outcome of the development process. The study applies three approaches; a quantitative survey with 31 organizations, qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with 36 software professionals, and four workshops for identifying and prioritizing quality goals. The study revealed that quality in software organization is not a single, easily definable entity, but a complex, interconnected concept fluctuating between the stakeholders. Overall, it seems that there is no general consensus over the important quality characteristics in software organizations and therefore software organizations could benefit from identifying the quality characteristics they consider important, and actively pursuing quality goals.