QFD: A Different Way to Measure Software Quality

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) technique has been developed in the context of Total Quality Management, and it has been experimented in the software engineering domain. This paper illustrated how key constructs from QFD contributed to an development of a second version of a Quality Factor (QF) for a qualitative software evaluation, considering three distinctive but connected areas of interest, each of them representing dimension of performance: • economic dimension, the perspective is the managers’ viewpoint; • social dimension, the perspective is the users' viewpoint; • technical dimension, the perspective is the developers' viewpoint. This new version of the original QF technique, referred to as QFD (Quality Factor through QFD), has the following features: it can be used for both a priori and a posteriori evaluations of the software product; it makes usage of the set of quality sub-characteristics proposed in the new upcoming ISO/IEC 9126:2000 standard it has a variable number of elements taken into account the three viewpoints for the evaluation; it offers the visual clarity from QFD for external and internal benchmarking. An implementation of this new version of this technique in quality models is also discussed.