ISBSG software project repository and ISO 9126 : an opportunity for quality benchmarking
Laila Cheikhi, Alain Abran, Luigi Buglione · 2006
The International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) provides the Software Engineering community with a repository of project data which, up to now, have been used mostly for benchmarking and for estimating project effort. The 2005 version of the ISBSG repository includes data on more than 3,000 projects from various countries, sized with different functional size measurement methods and including a number of quality-related variables. ISO/IEC 9126 (International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission) is a series of ISO documents for the evaluation of the quality of software products: it proposes three quality models (internal quality, external quality and quality in use), together with the ISO taxonomy of quality characteristics and subcharacteristics. ISO 9126 also includes an inventory of over two hundred measures of the quality subcharacteristics. The goal of this paper is to identify whether or not the current ISBSG repository can be of use for benchmarking software product quality on the basis of ISO 9126.