Measuring the quality needs of an organization's software

Investments in information systems and the annual costs of running the systems are considerable. The utility of information systems thus becomes the ultimate quality requirement from the organization's point of view. Quality models are used to support the management of quality. Such models describe the characteristics of products and services and of processes. The measurement of quality is a means of controlling quality. The problem that organizations face when they become interested in improving and controlling the quality of their information systems is twofold: there are many quality models and measurement is considered difficult. We address this issue by linking a basic quality model with existing software metrics. We use a quality model, the SOLE model, which covers the interests of all the stake-holders in an organization. We show how to adapt the model to the specific needs of an organization, how to identify their special quality factors and break these down to the metrics level. The general input-process-output (IPO) method from system theory is applied in the construction process. We propose a do-it-yourself approach which offers organizations the flexibility to construct quality models to meet their own needs. The construction process is the emphasis of this paper, rather than a complete quality model. A fictive case study is used to illustrate the construction process. We have chosen project management as the problem area of our "case" organization and adopt the waterfall model for the systems development process.