Quality management in software production, a customer oriented approach

127 Quality has been identified in the late 80s as the very core of competition in the software industry. Demonstrable high quality will become a prerequisite of survivalship for most software producing organizations. However, in software production no useful guidelines for quality management exist. In this paper we first discuss a framework for quality factors that serves as a bases of reference for quality management in software producing organizations. Then we adapt a customer oriented classification of production environment<;, taken from industrial production research, to the software industry. Mapping of the quality framework onto the framework of characteristics of the different software production types results in guidelines for the design of customer oriented quality management systems. Keyword Codes: K.6.0; K.6.1; K.6.3