Software Product Evaluation can be regarded as an instrument which will support such control. During a Software Product Evaluation the fit between the software product and the needs of that product are determined. This fit concerns both explicit and implicit needs about the product, often referred to as software product quality. By on the one hand examining the needed level of product quality, and on the other hand examining whether a product meets that level of quality, fitness for use is evaluated. This can be done during several phases of development and use, which results in increased control during the transformation from investment decision to actual implementation.
The relation between Evaluation of Information Technology and Software Product Evaluation is visualised in Figure 1. The left side depicts the development of investment proposals during Evaluation of Information Technology. The decision process is not refined and assumed to be a certain process that comes up with a ‘best’ proposal. On the right side, Software Product Evaluation is depicted as a process during implementation . The result of evaluation is software product quality at different moments. There is a relation between the investment proposal and the actual software product quality. The initial investment proposal is translated into software product quality from the start of implementation. During implementation several versions of the product can be compared to the intended software product quality of the investment proposal.
Software Product Evaluation becomes a growing market within the software industry. Customers and users get the opportunity to have a potential product evaluated to their needs and start demanding such evaluations more and more. On the other hand, certification institutes and evaluation companies push their evaluations into the market and increase revenues because of this new and well received services. And also, producers of these software products are confronted with Software Product Evaluations after their products have been developed. Therefore industry becomes pro-active to such evaluations and change development processes in such a way that the evaluation demands are directly addressed.
Software Product Evaluation addresses software product quality. Quality characteristics are used as attributes to describe a software product. During the short history of software engineering several quality models -in which the relations between the quality characteristics are determined- are presented. Each of these quality characteristics is split in several sub characteristics. For example quality characteristic ‘maintainability’ is divided into four quality sub characteristics: analysability, changeability, stability and testability. Below an overview of the ISO 9126 standard is presented.
Evaluations of software products must be objective - based upon observation, not opinion. They should also be reproducible. Evaluation of the same product to the same evaluation specification by different evaluators should produce results that can be accepted as identical and repeatable. To do so, procedures for project control and judgement are necessary. On the main level an evaluation process should be defined. During the Scope-project such an evaluation process is defined. The process was originally presented in five steps: analysis of evaluation requirements, specification of the evaluation, design and plan the evaluation, perform the evaluation and reporting.
The relation between Evaluation of Information Technology and Software Product Evaluation is visualised in Figure 1. The left side depicts the development of investment proposals during Evaluation of Information Technology. The decision process is not refined and assumed to be a certain process that comes up with a ‘best’ proposal. On the right side, Software Product Evaluation is depicted as a process during implementation . The result of evaluation is software product quality at different moments. There is a relation between the investment proposal and the actual software product quality. The initial investment proposal is translated into software product quality from the start of implementation. During implementation several versions of the product can be compared to the intended software product quality of the investment proposal.
Software Product Evaluation becomes a growing market within the software industry. Customers and users get the opportunity to have a potential product evaluated to their needs and start demanding such evaluations more and more. On the other hand, certification institutes and evaluation companies push their evaluations into the market and increase revenues because of this new and well received services. And also, producers of these software products are confronted with Software Product Evaluations after their products have been developed. Therefore industry becomes pro-active to such evaluations and change development processes in such a way that the evaluation demands are directly addressed.
Software Product Evaluation addresses software product quality. Quality characteristics are used as attributes to describe a software product. During the short history of software engineering several quality models -in which the relations between the quality characteristics are determined- are presented. Each of these quality characteristics is split in several sub characteristics. For example quality characteristic ‘maintainability’ is divided into four quality sub characteristics: analysability, changeability, stability and testability. Below an overview of the ISO 9126 standard is presented.
Evaluations of software products must be objective - based upon observation, not opinion. They should also be reproducible. Evaluation of the same product to the same evaluation specification by different evaluators should produce results that can be accepted as identical and repeatable. To do so, procedures for project control and judgement are necessary. On the main level an evaluation process should be defined. During the Scope-project such an evaluation process is defined. The process was originally presented in five steps: analysis of evaluation requirements, specification of the evaluation, design and plan the evaluation, perform the evaluation and reporting.
