Hiyam Al-Kilidar

The use and usefulness of the ISO/IEC 9126 quality standard

This paper reports an evaluation the utility of ISO/IEC 9126. ISO/IEC 9126 is an international standard intended to ensure the quality of all software-intensive products including safety-critical systems where lives are at risk if software components fail. Our evaluation exercise arose from an experiment that required a quality assessment of outputs of the design process. Although ISO/IEC 9126 is intended to support evaluation of intermediate software products, both the experimental subjects (158 final year computer science and engineering student) and experimenters found the standard was ambiguous in meaning, incomplete with respect to quality characteristics and overlapping with respect to measured properties. We conclude that ISO/IEC 9126 is not suitable for measuring design quality of software products. This casts serious doubts as to the validity of the standard as a whole.

Evaluation of effects of pair work on quality of designs

Quality is a key issue in the development of software products. Although the literature acknowledges the importance of the design phase of software lifecycle and the effects of the design process and intermediate products on the final product, little progress has been achieved in addressing the quality of designs. This is partly due to difficulties associated in defining quality attributes with precision and measurement of the many different types and styles of design products, as well as problems with assessing the methodologies utilized in the design process. In this research we report on an empirical investigation that we conducted to examine and evaluate quality attributes of design products created through a process of pair-design and solo-design. The process of pair-design methodology involves pair programming principles where two people work together and periodically switch between the roles of driver and navigator. The evaluation of the quality of design products was based on ISO/IEC 9126 standards. Our results show some mixed findings about the effects of pair work on the quality of design products.