Software Quality and Life Cycles.
Hannu Jaakkola, Bernhard Thalheim · 2005
Abstract. Quality of software has growing role of the modern software engineering work. Typical current trends in the development process are the dominating role of quality systems, the use of “productivity tools ” in the development, fast time to market and the adoption of the practices of the software development industrialization. Correspondingly the software product trends point out the growth of software size, longer life time, the critical role of software in services and products, increasing amount of client oriented variations of the same base product, and standardized platforms under the product solutions itself. As a consequence the new paradigms are guiding the software development: e.g. object oriented development culture is spreading fast and the role of reuse in its different forms (component level, patterns, designs) is becoming more important. Even the standard platforms, like Symbian, are giving guidelines to the developers restricting the freedom of solutions. The question on the software quality – in principle a clear and simple concept – is becoming more complex to specify and especially to teach for becoming software specialists. The paper includes the discussion on software quality issues from different points of view. The approach adopted classifies the quality based on software life cycles pointing out that the importance of different factors is changing along the development cycle. 1