Product Quality Evaluation Method (PQEM): To Understand the Evolution of Quality Through the Iterations of a Software Product

Abstract

Promoting quality within the context of agile software development, it is extremely important as well as useful to improve not only the knowledge and decision-making of project managers, product owners, and quality assurance leaders but also to support the communication between teams. In this context, quality needs to be visible in a synthetic and intuitive way in order to facilitate the decision of accepting or rejecting each iteration within the software life cycle. This article introduces a novel solution called Product Quality Evaluation Method (PQEM) which can be used to evaluate a set of quality characteristics for each iteration within a software product life cycle. PQEM is based on the Goal-Question-Metric approach, the standard ISO/IEC 25010, and the extension made of testing coverage in order to obtain the quality coverage of each quality characteristic. The outcome of PQEM is a unique multidimensional value, that represents the quality level reached by each iteration of a product, as an aggregated measure. Even though a value it is not the regular idea of measuring quality, we believe that it can be useful to use this value to easily understand the quality level of each iteration. An illustrative example of the PQEM method was carried out with two iterations from a web and mobile application, within the healthcare environment. A single measure makes it possible to observe the evolution of the level of quality reached in the evolution of the product through the iterations.